Is your business seasonal? Not only are certain services seasonal, but certain keywords and searches are as well. Search volume, or the number of searches made, fluctuates constantly. This data is vital for businesses when making decisions about content marketing or search ads. Even businesses that believe their products and services aren’t seasonal will be surprised to find out that their keywords are. Using Google’s tool Google Trends, a digital marketer can track spikes and valleys in search terms.
How To Use Google Trends
Like many great Google products, Trends is very easy to use. You will want to start with a basic keyword search. For instance, for a contractor, you may pick “roofing”. This will bring you to a graph where the Y-axis is 0-100. This axis represents search volume for that keyword with 100 being the peak for the year and all other values being a percentage of that peak. So for instance, if searches about roofing peaked in the second week of June, then all other values are percentages of that search volume. Each data point represents a single week. You can filter your search by region, time, and type of search. It’s recommended to filter the search by your state and to have a few months to a full year of data.
Comparing Data In Google Trends
Once you have selected a keyword, you can add a few more to compare. For our imaginary contractor, they may want to add decking, siding, and gutters. Decking is of course much more seasonal, especially in the northeast. Looking at a report for decking vs roofing in Massachusetts over 1 year period, we can see that Decking keywords drop off after July and begin rising in mid-March, hitting their peak in May. Interestingly enough, decking even eclipsed roofing searches at their peak. For an SEO perspective, this indicates that March-May is the best time to build new content around decking for both your website and social platforms. From an ads perspective, this is a good time to fine-tune your bidding for decking related keywords.
How To Use Google Trends Data
If you are working on content marketing for SEO, you should always have evergreen content or content that is valuable year-round. Your service pages, service area pages, and some of your metadata can be evergreen. However, depending on the seasonality of your business, you will want to tweak existing content and produce new content to match the search volume in your area. If you manage a blog, you should be aware of what topics are trending. When you enter a basic keyword into Google Trends like “decking” you will also see related terms that have recently been increasing in search volume like “composite decking”. This can inform your blogging or it may be a good reason to create sub-pages for your existing service pages. As a contractor, you may want to consider creating multiple decking pages for different materials or different deck services (repair, installation, maintenance, etc). These breakout keywords are helpful for finding the right content strategy for your business.
Learn More On SEO Strategy
There are a variety of tools that can help improve your SEO and SEM strategies. For more ideas on how to take your website’s digital assets to the next level, check out our ideas blog. And for a completely free website audit, contact Boston Web Marketing.