I’m always looking for new ways to perform keyword research and have been experimenting with Google Trends. For those of you NOT aware of Google Trends, here something directly from Google:
“Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.”
Basically, you can type in a search phrase and find out how it’s trending in popularity throughout the month. For example, if I type “link building”, I’ll be able to find how popular this keyword is over the last few weeks and also find relative phrases. Some suggestions have search volume and will be awesome keywords for content writing. Google Trends will provide a “Top Rising” or “Breakdown” section, showing which phrases have gained momentum.
Google Trends has worked magic for me and I would like to provide you with a few pointers when using this strategy to find effective keywords for your content. Even though this strategy does work pretty much out of the box, it’s important you know what factors are important when choosing the right keywords. Let’s get started…
Niche Relevant
When using Google Trends, you’re NOT changing your main keyword when searching. I always encourage clients to start with their main keyword because many research tools have been configured to narrow down, providing a handful of suitable results. For example, when I type in “link building” within Google Trends and scroll to the bottom, here’s what the results provide…
Next,
You’ll also notice the results will allow you to narrow by Country and then City/State. This means if you have a geo-location blog, you’ll be able to narrow down to your location to find keywords that way, too. Another trick is to click on various keywords to keep narrowing down.
Once you’ve gathered a cool handful of keywords, you can move to the next step.
Head over to Google Keyword Planner and start punching in the keywords to find out current search volume. Google Trends is awesome for finding keywords, but NOT finding current search volume by month. This is why you need Keyword Planner to really narrow down the keywords you have. Depending on the length of your content, you can use all the keywords but if you have 10-15, then I would suggest using 6-7 of the best keywords.
When I take the following, which I copied from the example above, here’s what the Google Keyword Planner tool provided:
- seo link building
- google link building
- link building services
- link building service
- building links
- free link building
- website link building
You can see from the illustration above that NOT only did Google Trends provide me with niche relevant keywords, but also those with a suitable search volume each month. You can now use this information to keep researching more keywords or simply start embedding them in your content as long as your post is relevant to “link building”, which is our root keyword.
Google Trends is very effective if you know what you’re doing because it’s pulling information from the search engine directly. It’s pretty much taking a search pattern seen throughout the months and presenting it in an organized manner. Even though you can use this information effectively, you just need to know how to use the tool and narrow down the right keywords going forward. If you can master this strategy, then, you won’t have any problems finding the right keywords for your content and SEO campaigns.