Originally published June 30, 2022 , updated on January 17, 2023

How do you keep track of what your B2B audience wants to read? As every digital content marketing agency will tell you, finding out what your audience wants to read is challenging. Creating captivating posts, articles, and videos starts by understanding the audience, their interests, and search behaviours.

According to the Ahref’s blog post on long-tail keyword research, their US database shows that 3.8 billion keywords receive fewer than ten queries in a month. Publishing information for keywords for which there are few monthly searches wastes your company’s resources. Internet Live Stats reports that 16 to 20% of search queries are 100% unique.

Google Trends helps you to avoid low volume keywords while showing you the ones for which your company will want to rank. It also enables you to find fresh topic ideas to meet new query trends in your industry.

Why Google Trends Is Every Digital Content Marketing Agency’s Best Friend

Google Trends is a robust and free online tool that enables marketers to identify search volumes and patterns for topics and keyword strings.

The filtering capability makes it useful for agencies that offer content marketing services. Marketers can filter query trends according to dates, countries, sub-regions, cities, rising popularity, topics or keywords, related queries, and more.

With historical and real-time data, marketers get current information. They can use it to plan their content marketing services and the publishing output for your company.

What Are the Best Content Marketing Company Uses for Google Trends?

Keyword research is at the heart of best search engine optimisation (SEO) and online publishing practices. But to understand why Google Trends is a go-to tool for agencies, let’s explore what you can learn from using the tool for planning your content strategy in 2022.

1. Find New Popular Trends in Keyword Search

Sometimes you have to listen in on conversations before sharing information. Dropping a keyword here and there to focus attention on what you have to say can work great. But only if those keywords relate to what interests the group at that moment.

You want keywords related to the conversation yet, fresh enough to spark interest. Google Trends enables you to find the keywords that drive interest at the right moment.

Content planning around buzzing topics like Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter works better if you know which keywords apply to your audience. Specific topics will top the charts at different times of the year.

With Google Trends, you can perform keyword research to find hot topics in your niche and plan your information output.

A search for “blogging software” as a topic in the US reveals “search engine optimization” and “website” as related topics, with “SEO blog software” as a related query.

The data shows a 180% search volume increase for “SEO blog software” as a related query.

2. Discover Suitable Images to Include in Blog Posts

Google Trends enables filtering according to:

• Web Search
• Image Search
• News Search
• Google Shopping
• YouTube Search

Under Web Search, click to include videos, images, news, or shopping results.

Your digital content marketing agency might want to add a graph to explain the performance of blog software. The marketers can retrieve applicable visuals and add these to blog posts on the topic using the image search functionality. They can also add the search phrase to the image using Alt Text functionality. This enables web users to also find your pages through image searches.

3. Identify New Variations in Targeted Key Phrases

Life’s not constant, and we have no reason to assume that people will always use the same keyword to find information or products. As their understanding of topics deepens and conversation develops, they use new terms to look for the same thing.

A digital content marketing agency can use Google Trends to find which prefixes are most popular for content marketing. For instance, they learn whether to use digital, online, internet, organic search, blog or SEO as a prefix in their primary key phrase.

They can use Google Trends to discover which variations have become popular and which ones are on a downward path. This enables them to get in on terms that are still new but fast gaining popularity before competitors develop rank for those terms.

In the example below, we want to find out whether digital, SEO, online, internet or web will be the best to use with the main keyword string. We’ve typed “digital marketing company”, and, using the plus option, we’re able to see more variations.

The results show “digital marketing company” in the lead, with “online marketing company” as the runner-up.

4. Compare Competitor Name Search Popularity

Want to find out if more people search for your brand than for your competitors? Then Google Trends is your friend. Type your brand name and that of your competitor in the compare box. Add more competitors to see where your brand ranks in relation to them.

The example below shows a brand comparison search for the two leading telecommunication companies in the US.

5. Develop Your Content Calendar Based on Trending Topics

An article hub or pillar page leading to articles or posts related to the umbrella topic enables you to build authority on the topic. Being the go-to source on a topic means many high-ranking websites will link to your pages. It gives your page a better position for the topic in the Google search results. This is why just about every top SEO content marketing agency follows the hub approach for information publishing.

But you need popular topics and keywords. That’s why the best SEO content marketing agencies use Google Trends to plan their output according to trending discussions and searches.

The trick is to put the tracking on auto-pilot for your particular industry and identified topic clusters. This will enable you to develop authoritative clusters on current and future trending topics. With this approach, your company can compete with the best content marketing agency’s strategy.

6. Determine In-Demand Keywords for Your Services to Match the Buyer’s Journey

Searches with “what” in the key string imply that the buyer is in the awareness stage. Your SEO content marketing agency will focus articles and blog posts on topics to answer the “what” questions of the buyer.

To find the top trending related queries to the topic “content marketing”, select Top instead of Rising in the drop-down menu under the related queries results.

“What is content marketing” is at the top, showing most of the searchers are in the awareness stage.

Trailing in the fourth position is the “how-to” queries, which indicates many of the users are in the awareness or the consideration stage.

By generating posts to give them step-by-step instructions or general guidelines, your digital agency bridges the gap between the awareness and decision-making stages. With this approach, the marketers nurture leads.

Once buyers are at the decision stage, they’re ready to buy products or subscribe to your SaaS services. At this stage, you can create information pieces to help them decide on the best company or service.

At the awareness stage, the SaaS B2B target audience enters broad keywords and might use singular rather than plural keywords to find information to help them understand their problem.

For a SaaS company looking to create pages to attract buyers in the middle of the funnel stages, queries focused on comparisons, product or service features, how products work, integrations, and use case searches are relevant.

Queries related to the best solution, approach, company, comparisons, and alternatives show buyers are at the decision-making stage.

7. Find Time of Year Topics for Your Digital Content Marketing Agency

Use Google Trends to find topics related to the specific time of the year.

A company that sells an app to reduce leave processing time might see an increase in searches for leave processing apps towards the end of the year.

A micro-SaaS selling a solution to track holiday travel expenses will see an increase in searches for related keywords just before the festive season and at the start of the tax filing period.

Likewise, a keyword string for accommodation management software will attract more buyers in the decision-making stage just before the festive season.

8. Keep Your Material Current—Identify Outdated Information

Find out how long a keyword has been popular and whether its popularity has increased or declined over the years. To do so, your digital content marketing agency adjusts the analysis period. It gives the agency an idea of which keywords are best performers over the long term and which ones have lost ground.

Working with the agency, you can update old posts for the current best-performing keywords to renew interest in your published material. Google Trends helps you to avoid using resources on keywords that are losing popularity.

To find long-term best performers, type the search term and change the period to “Past 5 years” and select the region.

For instance, a search for “digital content marketing agency” shows only a slight increase in searches over the past five years.

9. Find Out if a Market Exists for Your Niche in a Specific Region or City

Use Google Trends to find out if companies in a particular country are in the market for your SaaS services. To do this, filter according to region or country when you enter the search term. Also, look at the related queries and topics for rising interest and top performers.

Use the region filter to restrict the search to a particular country. View the sub-regions to see interest in the key phrase, related queries, and topics. This is useful for a micro-SaaS or tech subscription company with services that apply to a specific region or city of a country.

Your content marketing agency can use the information to generate articles and posts to match information with the audience’s needs in the sub-region or city.

10. Map Your Social Media Publishing Strategy to the Most Popular Searches

Meet social interests with articles and posts that connect with trending discussions. Google Trends gives you insight into what people search for across the world and according to country. See what’s trending in the country of interest by choosing it from the drop-down menu in the upper right corner of the Google Trends homepage.

See what’s trending in the US by region or by broad topic from the Google Trends main page.

Scroll down to discover the hot topics for the previous years.

11. Identify Future Topic and Keyword Trends

Historical and current data provide the content marketing agency a foundation for predicting spikes and dips in search volumes, keyword uses, and topic popularity. Armed with this information, it’s possible to plan output to hit the sweet spot in hikes for optimal traffic generation and conversions.

What Google Trends Doesn’t Show

Low-volume searches come up as “0” in Google Trends. Don’t look at this as a negative. What you do learn is that few people search for the keyword string in the world, specific country or sub-region.

The tool also doesn’t show polling data, and it filters out searches that include special characters in the keywords. To improve the accuracy of trend results, the tool filters duplicate searches performed from the same IP address within a short period.

Why We Include Google Trends in Our Digital Content Marketing Services

Knowing how to use Google Trends helps marketers to plan their output. But it takes time to learn how to use the insights for better organic search placement. Our marketers track keyword and topic trends to match copywriting topics with the interests of your target audience.

But most important—our creative team develops editorial calendars to match information delivery with what’s trending in your particular industry. Using the related queries filter, the team finds fresh topic ideas to drive sales conversions and improve your outreach success in 2022.

Visit our planning and strategy services section to learn how we develop comprehensive strategies for your company.

Is Google Trends Sufficient for Keyword Research?

As useful a tool as it is, Google Trends has its limitations. For instance, it doesn’t provide data for Twitter. Likewise, it’s not suited for finding polling data.

Marketers use it alongside AnswerthePublic and other tools for comprehensive insights.

How to Start

Connect with our digital content marketing agency to help your company make the best use of Google Trends in 2022.

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