How To Use Google Trends To Pick a Marketing Niche

In this episode “Digital Dave” spells out how to use Google Trends to try to identify trends that are your friend and can help you pick a good niche for your marketing.

Episode Transcript

Today we are going to look at a great tool that ties in with some of our previous topics that we’ve been talking about regarding how to pick a niche. That is Google Trends.

Google Trends has been around for quite some time, and allows you to go search and define the search trends for certain words. One of the things that you’re going want to know about Google Trends is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be always in an uptrend to be a good trend. It can actually be in a downtrend as long as there is plenty of searches for that topic.

Now to illustrate Google Trends, you would want to go to trends.google.com and that will bring up the Google Trends home page. There’s always some interesting information right on the homepage. We’re not going to spend any time on this today, but go check it out.

What we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna actually talk about how to use this to pick a niche. We’re going to use the illustration today in the Health market. Just for ease of comparison, we’re going to look at some health topics and we’re going to compare the trends within those health topics. Then, we’re going to look at some longer tail keywords within those topics as well. Just to kind of see how those translate into a trend that we might be able to use as a niche for our business.

Let’s start by putting in a search term. We’re going to put in … today, we’ll start with the term anxiety. That seems to be a big topic these days. We’re going to type in anxiety. First thing we will see about anxiety is the anxiety graph of searches that have occurred over the last 12 months worldwide. We can actually narrow down, or expand this if we want to. I may say, “I only want this search trend within the United States.” When we change that, we see a slightly different look. It’s a little bit more of an uptrend here (in the US) than it was if we searched it globally.

Then down below, if you want to see where most of the searches are coming from, you would see the states that are searching this. Now, why is this important? Well, again, if you’re looking for some longer tale words to use in your marketing. You would want to use anxiety and West Virginia, anxiety and Vermont. You can see how quickly and easily you can translate the trend line into more long tail searches or keywords.

Now, I’m going to extend this trend line out a little bit. I’m going to go out five years and take a look at what that looks like. Now, that looks quite different. So over the last 12 months, we’re kind of static maybe a little bit up. But if you go back five years, you can clearly see that there’s an uptrend in the anxiety health niche.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to take what I already know and I know that by state. And here’s some of my key states … and actually, when I went out five years Maine came up number one. Maine, Rhode Island, isn’t that interesting? How it changed? West Virginia was bumped to number two.

What you can also do is you can compare keywords. So we’re in the health niche, let’s just say I’m deciding on which niche I might want to pick within health. I’m gonna use some other bigger scale topics within health and we’re gonna compare these in here and we’ll see how they compare. We’ll compare anxiety to depression.

What we see is that anxiety is the blue, much more straight trend line, where depression kind of bounces up and down. But they kind of follow the same line a little bit. Both have a slight uptrend and it looks like and it also gives you some breakdowns of the dual words together. Or words that are related. So here’s your related queries and words that you can use to expand on both of these topics.

We’re gonna continue this on and we’ll say … we’ll go completely different here. How about we go and we put in weight loss. Weight loss, yeah again, same thing. It’s jumping all over the place. So, let’s see if we can find some commonalities within why this weight loss trend … it’s slightly up-trending, I guess. But it’s very seasonal for some reason or another. It seems to be very seasonal towards what? The beginning of the year, right? Everybody has their New Years Resolutions and there’s always a spike, it looks like, every year in the amount of traffic right around January 1st.

Again, why might that be critical? Well, when you’re marketing, you want to make sure you are ready to go by December the fifteenth and you have your marketing messages already out there trying to capture those people during this spike. This is a very short spike, but a lot of people are searching during that time. So those are critical factors when you’re picking your niche within these trend lines.

Let’s go ahead and add another one here. Let’s add something again, kind of completely different. How about back pain? Back pain is the green and same thing. This has got a slight uptrend as well with a decent uptrend recently. So, I don’t know why all of a sudden there’s a forced uptrend here in back pain. Very interesting that all of a sudden is starting to pick up some steam as far as searches.

So back pain, and let’s add in another one here that’s at a high, blood pressure. That’s purple, that’s a flat line. Maybe even … yeah, that’s flat. That’s a completely flat line. So again, it doesn’t necessarily matter that any one of them are up or down trending per se. What does matter is the number of searches that are occurring within that word that you are using as a whole.

We’ve looked at these words over a five year period in the United States. Let’s go ahead and expand this back out to all just for kicks. Just to see what the difference looks like because you may not be limiting yourself to only wanting to market within the United States. If you’re marketing worldwide, you can see the search volumes are higher for each one of them. Looks like individually and it also looks like the trends are very similar. With, again, back pain being the one showing the greatest uptrend recently. Although, if you follow the trend line longer term, you could go with anxiety. It’s got more of an upward trending line as a whole from start to finish than back pain.

From this, we took some words related to health and we decided that we were going to kind of compare them to pick a niche. For my analysis here, if I were looking at this, and here are some related queries that kind of relate independently to the words themselves. Each one has its own list of related queries. I think if I were going to pick the niche today from these health terms, I would probably go with anxiety.

So, we’re gonna go ahead expand on that one. To remove your other ones, you just click on them, click remove, and we’re going to get rid of all of these. We’re going to dive in a little deeper into anxiety.

Anxiety gets a lot of searches. If you were going to go out and market for the keyword anxiety, you’re probably going to have a hard time ranking or getting traffic for the word anxiety directly. However, what we can do is start to break that down a little bit and look at some of the trends for maybe some of the long tail keywords or phrases.

So, I’m going to now say, let’s start with anxiety in men. We didn’t get anything, so it couldn’t find any information on there. Let’s take out the in and let’s just put in men, still flat line. How about men’s anxiety? It’s still flatlining. Let’s try women. It’s actually giving you a list of the overall phrases that it’s gonna give you information for here. Although, we were trying something, I wanted to see if it would give us some longer tail suggestions. We’re not going go too long here in this video.

I’m just going to go ahead and pick anxiety disorder and see if that shows a different kind of trend. That one is kind of a downtrend. Let’s go back and look at the related words again and let’s see if we can find anxiety disorder. Seems like anxiety … Social anxiety, alright, let’s try that.

These are trends, so they are looking for somewhat bigger topics versus just straight searches alone, which we could just go to Google Keyword Tool and get actual … the statistics on individual phrases and words. Which is what we would do next after we looked at Google Trends, but we’re trying to find some of the major trends.

Social anxiety, anxiety symptoms … you can see just by adding one word, you’re limiting the number of people that are searching that word but you are making that word probably a little bit longer tail and less competitive in your searches. If I were going to go further with this, I would take this topic, this trend, and I would break it down into some longer tail phrases. Such as what we were searching for, anxiety for men, anxiety for women, anxiety for overweight people, anxiety for people who work.

There’s a lot of different ways to extend a word into longer tail keywords. Then, in the Google Keyword Tool, which we’ll cover in another episode, will show you how to take a trend like anxiety and break that down into some longer tail keyword phrases that you might be able to use in your marketing. That you would rank for fairly quickly and get some immediate traffic.

This is today’s episode, which is really using Google Trends to compare some topics that you might be interested in looking for trends. For search traffic over time to determine if that might be a valuable niche for you to market into within your business.

So again, this is Digital Dave, thanks for joining us today. We’ll be back in another episode soon. Catch us later, thanks. Bye-bye.