Improve Your SEO Strategy with Search Trends

When we set out to build a digital marketing strategy, one of the most important elements is content creation: what we are going to say on our social media, the copy on the website, the ads we will run on Facebook…

If we want to gain visibility, we need to find out what our audience is interested in, which in SEO means carrying out good keyword research.

In this post you will learn how to find ideas for your articles and also how to tell apart the ideas that can bring traffic to your website or earn plenty of likes on Instagram because they are a trending topic.

Let’s get into this working method, which will save you from creating invisible content for your digital strategy.

Answer the public

If you don’t know what to write about, ask your audience. They will tell you which topics they want you to cover and what you can offer them. That is exactly what the Answer The Public tool does.

Select your language and country, and with a single query you can discover long-tail keywords that other users search for on Google and find different categories that will be useful for different pieces of content.

Let us tell you about some of them.

Questions. As users, we increasingly tend to make specific queries that start with why, when, where, how… With this tool you can find out what questions your target audience has.

Prepositions. Here the preposition we are probably most interested in is “for”. Let’s say we want to write an article about digital strategy. At this point it gives us some clues about who to aim the post at; digital strategy for social media, digital strategy for restaurants, digital strategy for psychologists…

Comparisons. Many users search in order to find the best alternative between two options or to add more information to their search; some examples we can get following the previous example are digital strategies and tactics, and digital marketing and sales strategy for startups.

Suggestions. Here you will have an endless source of ideas. But not all of them will be useful. Later on we will enter the terms we are most interested in into the following tools to find out their keyword volume.

Related. It returns other keywords related to the one we entered.

Let’s do a recap of everything the tool helps us with:

– Writing more appealing titles

– Finding topics that had not occurred to us at first

– Giving our content semantic richness by adding synonyms and related keywords

– Discovering engaging content for social media

– Improving our project’s SEO rankings by ranking for relevant keywords

The Sistrix keyword tool

If Answer The Public doesn’t seem enough, you can use the Sistrix keyword tool. It works in a very similar way and its suggestions are quite accurate because they are based on real user questions.

You will also see the results sorted by search volume. Although it doesn’t give us the exact figure, we will know what is searched for most in relation to our keyword.

It is a good idea to compare the data from both tools to get the full picture, as the figures may differ. The more topics and data you have to build your strategy, the better.

These tools are perfect for kicking off our content strategy. All we still need is the search volume and how competitive that keyword is.

So let us introduce you to another very valuable tool.

Use the Keyword Planner

In your digital strategy you will very likely consider running an SEM ad campaign, in other words, paid advertising on search engines. It is an excellent marketing action when you want immediate visibility or you are launching a new product and want to promote it.

The interesting thing about Google Ads campaigns is the keyword tool built into the platform’s features. Don’t worry, though, here is a guide to accessing the platform without having to create an ad.

Once inside, we will go to Tools > Keyword Planner > Discover new keywords and the tool itself will do the rest of the work.

To illustrate the example I have entered «digital strategy» and, as you can see, it shows not only the approximate number of searches in ranges, but also some suggestions and the competition for this keyword.

Keyword competition in Google’s Keyword Planner refers to the number of advertisers competing to have their ad shown on its search network.

If a keyword has high competition, it means it is harder for our digital strategy to be visible for that keyword, so it will be easier to go for the ones with low or medium competition.

So far we already have the best tools to build a digital strategy with content that interests users, that gets searches and whose ranking difficulty we also know.

But how would you like to be the first to offer users content on a topic? That is possible thanks to Google Trends.

Analyse trends with Google Trends

If you didn’t know Google Trends, it will become your favourite tool with this short guide.

As the name suggests, it is a feature offered by Google to assess the popularity of a keyword on a scale from 0 to 100 so you can draw conclusions about its future trend.

We can enter several terms to compare their popularity at different points in time. Depending on your query, you will see how interest has evolved more clearly if you set the time range to 12 months or even 5 years.

Let’s look at a practical example.

We have less and less time to clean the house, and advances in home automation and small appliances keep growing, so we will assume this will be an interesting search term. But first of all we need to choose the right filters that Trends offers us.

Location. Select the country where your target audience is. Further down you will be able to see interest broken down by autonomous community.

Time range. Depending on your search you may need one range or another. As we have already seen, 12 months is usually a good option.

Category. This option is useful when a term has different meanings. By selecting the specific category we are interested in, we remove results that could give us misleading data.

Search engine. It lets us see search interest across the different search engines in Google’s network. By default you will find Web Search, which covers regular searches, but you can also find interesting information in the Google Shopping data (where users have stronger purchase intent) or YouTube Search (where people watch reviews and look for information about the product).

Very important! You will also need to identify the seasonality of any chart.

See that peak at the end of the chart? What made interest shoot up so much at the end of November? Exactly, Black Friday! Knowing this, you will be able to make better decisions in your digital strategy, prepare seasonal content to attract visitors to your website and grow your project.

And we can dig even deeper. After this chart we get an interactive map with the average interest in each autonomous community. Selling an air purifier in Murcia, where interest is 100, would not be the same as selling one in the Canary Islands, where average interest comes out at 56 points.

Finally, we find related topics and related queries, which we could add to the ones we have already gathered thanks to Answer The Public and the Keyword Planner.

More useful Google Trends features

All these tools are great, but do I have to check these trends every so often?

Google likes to make things easy for us from time to time, which is why we have the subscriptions option. We enter the search term we want to monitor, the country and how often we want to receive updates (for now we can choose between once a week or once a month).

Done!

We will receive an email in our inbox with the latest updates.

With all this you will be able to put together a solid long-term content strategy to rank your project. Remember that Google loves to drop by your website and see new updates.

What about you? Which tool will you get the most out of?

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