If you want to know what your competitors are doing to get better rankings on Google, or what new keywords are emerging in the marketplace, then you need to use Google Trends. The data provided by Google Trends is invaluable for understanding what people are searching for, and can be used to come up with new keyword ideas, and optimize existing ones. Even though the primary use case for using Google Trends is to improve your SEO, it can also be used for keyword research. In this article, we will go into more detail about how to use Google Trends for SEO and keyword research.
How To Use Google Trends for Keyword Research
If you’re looking for ideas for new content, or are simply looking to decide which keywords to optimize for, Google Trends can help.
Go into Google Trends and search using a seed keyword (for example “weight loss surgery near me”) Scroll down to “Related Queries”.
Here we find a search term that’s growing in popularity at the time of writing: “vsg surgery”. Try other seed keywords and see what you can find!
Another very useful thing you can do is compare keywords. Let’s say we compare “weight loss surgery near me” with “vsg surgery near me”. This is what we get:
Clearly the more general term has more search volume than the more specific term. But let’s try comparing two terms for the same thing: vsg surgery near me and gastric sleeve surgery near me.
Now we see more inflection points where the VSG term overtakes the gastric sleeve term! Pretty interesting…
Let’s try using the gastric sleeve term and see what kind of related queries we get.
This could inform your future content plans, or give you more keywords to optimize for! But there’s more we can do. We can use it to come up with a lot more content that actually capitalizes on growing trends. Here’s how.
Using “gastric sleeve surgery near me”, we can scroll down and see “Related Topics”, sorted by “Rising” (or how much traffic has grown comparatively over the time period selected).
According to this, more people are looking at these topics than before. Calculation is a big one, as many people may be trying to figure out:
- Cost of gastric sleeve surgery
- BMI calculator to see if they qualify
- How fast they’ll lose weight after gastric sleeve surgery
Without these calculators, you might be missing out on some high quality traffic!
Hope this guide helped you. Play around with Google Trends and see what you can find! Just know that Google Trends for SEO is not the #1 way a search marketer should spend their time, however taking a dive once every few weeks or so can help inform content plans and improve your overall SEO efforts.
Learn More About Weight Loss Marketing
If you’re a bariatric surgeon looking to market your weight loss solutions, check out this article: Weight Loss Marketing Ideas
SEO-friendly content writing has changed a lot in the past few decades. The days of keyword stuffing and unreadable articles are over, and the days of valuable, quality content are here to stay. But how do you balance quality content with SEO? Read more: Tips for SEO-friendly Content Writing
