Digital publishers generally understand the value of riding the rising wave of a popular trend, though many lack the skills to identify the exact moment a trend begins to take-off.
Publishing content to coincide with a rising trend for a topic can significantly improve performance. Conversely, meticulously researching a keyword for search volume, difficulty and search intent only to then publish content after its search trend begins to decline is a missed SEO opportunity.
This is where Google Trends comes in.
Google Trends can help publishers discover trending topics, find new niches, plan their content strategy, optimize it for specific geographies, and even enhance video content strategy. All this for free.
Despite this, Google Trends remains a relatively underutilized tool by many publishers. Its graphs and trendlines are, at first glance, not as appealing as the feature-rich interface and easy-to-consume numerical search data produced by other SEO tools.
However, Google Trends’ deceptively simple interface hides a powerful trend predictor and keyword research tool.
With this in mind, we’ve compiled a step-by-step guide to using Google Trends as a publisher, explaining the intricacies involved and covering useful hacks that save time and scale up its SEO benefits.
