With COVID-19 keeping many businesses shut, it’s important to find other ways to connect with audiences and drive conversions. This is why online sales are currently surging. Google Trends is an invaluable tool for site owners that can be used to predict customer behaviour, especially during the post-coronavirus pandemic.
Changes are happening almost daily, with traditional search trends evolving in ways that search marketers have never seen before. This fast-moving landscape has made way for greater use of Google Trends, offering a daily analysis of what’s being searched for every day.
Google Trends uncovers opportunities within e-commerce brands, local businesses, publishers, celebrities…the list goes on. Since the majority of the world has had to stay at home for a number of months or days and many people unemployed, interest in indoor hobbies and job opportunity searches began to spike.
For example, as seen below, one of the highest searched terms in the past two months has been ‘surgical masks’, which health companies can take onboard and target to potential customers. Interest over time was at its peak towards the end of April, which then dropped off and picked up again to the front end of May. This suggests that a large number of the public would have been looking to purchase masks.
Likewise, searches for ‘gardening’ have skyrocketed since the lockdown, so companies that are focused in the gardening/garden product industry could take leverage of this and target ads tailored to those searching for this term.
When it comes to growth in the demand for gardening products and accessories (such as below), gardening companies have a large number of options at their disposal. It’s also vital to ensure you make use of the new free listings on Google Shopping. And, it’s important to have excellent on-page content for all category pages so that they are ranking properly on Google SERPs. Audiences are looking for ways to fix up their gardens and spend longer in the sun, thus offering some sort of tips or DIY tactics would allow companies to see a jump in traffic to their websites.
There is an abundance of other things you can do with this tool too, such as web searching, image searching, Google shopping, news and much more. If looking for an array of terms in one go, you can click through Google Trends to see how search trends are evolving over time as well as comparing different search terms. Start by inspecting the valuable keywords on your website and visualise how the searches are moving for those products.
Red: exercise
Blue: hand sanitiser
Yellow: trampolines
As shown below, there is a comparison of three different search terms that people have been searching for during the past 90 days. As shown, marketers can use this information and tailor personalised messages or adapt their content to work around these trends to retain customers, subsequently keeping them engaged.
All in all, Google Trends allows you to see how your customers are thinking and searching during the pandemic. You can take ahold of this information and utilise it to better your overall marketing strategy to retain and convert your customers.
Looking to enhance your website organically to rank better on Google? Contact the SEO team at Colewood.
