Use Top Search Engine Trends to Grow Business

An Introduction to Google Trends

Half the battle of running a business is figuring out what potential customers want. Google Trends can provide you a pretty good idea, and there is a lot that a small business can do with this kind of information.  Google is one of the top search engines of our time, and that means Google knows a heck of a lot about what the world is searching for on the Internet. Now with Google Trends, it's easy and F*R*E*E to follow search engine trends, which can turn into great information for growing your business.

The Google Trends tool is used to follow the popularity of specific search terms across different cities, countries, and languages. The Trends tool collects data back to 2004, and provides up-to-the-minute search string trends to the present date.

Here are a few practical ways you can use Google Trends for your business:

Fine Tune Your Website Content

You can use the popular search terms found on Google Trends to fine tune your web content. In very simplistic terms, if you sell hats, you might enter in the hat types you offer into Google Trends in order to see which ones are searched for more often (i.e., red hats, blue hats, green hats). The Google Trends tool will then compare the search strings. The day I searched, the searches for "red hats" far surpassed those for "blue hats" and "green hats" when it came to the overall trends. With this information, you could go back to your web content and make sure you used the keywords "red hats" throughout your site and that you plugged your red hats over any other hats. You might even run a special on red hats. In any case, you'll probably want to keep ample red hats in stock.  

Give Them the Products They Want
You can use Google Trends to figure out what products the masses are searching for on the Internet. If you own an online store or sell an array of products, this information can help you figure out what people want most. If you own a local business, you can even narrow down a product's popularity by city or region. It's not surprising, for instance, that from September to December, more people are searching the term "winter coat" in Chicago and New York than in Los Angeles or Tampa. Even if you have a brick and mortar business, most people do their research for products on the Internet, so they're telling the search engine what they're interested in buying even if they end up purchasing it offline.
 
Give Them the Content They Want  
If you offer a company newsletter, a blog, or other regular content on your website, you can use the Hot Trends tool in Google Trends to see the daily topics, up to the minute, that people searching on Google are most interested in hearing about. So, say you sell technology equipment, and you notice the #5 search in Hot Trends is for the Apple iPhone. You may decide to write your next e-newsletter article on this product.

Google Trends is a wonderful and simple-to-use tool for keeping you "in the know" about industry trends and more. Consider implementing the data you can pull using this tool into your everyday planning and business considerations. After all, there is nothing anymore that you can't "Google."