Use Google Trends to Map Your SEO

Welcome back Rankers! I wanted to show you a couple of things this week. First of all we’re going to talk a bit about President Donald Trump because there’s some good data around.

This is a Tweet I did to @realDonaldTrump last week. You can see the spike and the number of Tweets over a 28-day period, roughly 430 thousand impressions. Mine never get that much, but that’s not important. The reason I did that was that I wanted to go and see what would happen, and this is not a definitive test, I’ll probably troll some others around the Inter-webs just to see if I can get some better data than what I’ve got here. So the date of my Tweet was the 2/1/17 and it had 433 thousand impressions, a bunch of re-Tweets, a bunch of likes and we’ve got Google coming in and crawling all the pages. It’s not a definitive test. That’s not even our normal busy day. Our normal busy day is a Wednesday, and while it’s a Wednesday here, it’s not in the U.S. and that’s what that data is. Bit difficult to know, but interesting.

The Many Talents of Google Trends

So that led me on to looking at what else can we use Google Trends data for? Because we know amazon is coming to Australia this year. We know that Amazon is bringing the box and everything. Two-hour delivery, all that stuff is coming to Australia. We also had the announcement over the weekend that Amazon accounts for 43% of online sales in the U.S.! One company, 43% of online sales in the U.S. So keep that number in mind.

So then we started having the discussion here in the office, “Well who are Australia’s biggest retailers?” Big W here is really big online, not a lot of people know that but they are. They get a lot of searches and you see a lot of ads. And you can see from this graph that for searches they certainly outnumber both Amazon and arguably our other high profile retailer, Kogan. Now if in the U.S. Amazon accounts for 43% of online sales, what’s that going to do to those other two brands? Wait and see.

Network News

Here’s something else that Google Trends can show you. It can show you what networks are the most popular. What network should you play in? When are those networks popular? You can see that Facebook is the yellow line. It’s the big gorilla out of all of them. The green one is Instagram, the red line is Twitter (and we’ll get back to Twitter later), the blue line is Snapchat and the purple one is LinkedIn.

So I’ll remove LinkedIn. I know it’s important, but every time I go on there I just get recruiters trying to contact me or staff updating their C.V.s. Or other sales people trying to contact me or people trying to sell me remote staff. I find LinkedIn very boring and the ‘feature’ of sponsored email really annoying. Volunteering ourselves for spam. Anyway. So I’m not a fan. I know there are a lot of good things on LinkedIn and a lot of people use it. Specifically sales people and recruiters!

So if we look at the blue Snapchat line, it’s very similar with its peaks and troughs to Instagram. And you would have to say that these guys are busiest on the weekends. If we take a look at Twitter. Now you may know that Twitter has been going through a demise.

If we look at this graph, it represents the past five years. We can see the U.S. Presidential Election and the Inauguration. You can see that Twitter has been on a downward trend that whole five years. Does the end of the graph represent a change? As we know, the President sends a lot of Tweets and I think he may be making Twitter great again as it’s spiking. It’ll be interesting to watch that piece of data.

One of the other ones I did recently too, was a local politician here who says he’s going alone and splitting from his major party to start his own party. Another right-wing politician. So I compared him up against Australia’s most well known right-wing politician, Pauline Hanson. Sorry I said ‘extreme’ last time Bruce. Look, I have no dog, horse or any animal in this race, as I don’t like politics. I think they’re all crooks just so you know.

So I have four politicians here, including our President, Malcolm Trumble. He rates a seven. He’s more popular than Cory Bernardi on that particular day. Richard Di Di Natale, the leader of the Greens, is not getting any brand awareness at all. He needs to do something about his personal brand. The Cory bloke is around the bottom. If we remove our alternate named Prime Minister we’d find this Cory bloke the third most popular politician.

Map Your SEO

My point is this can show you a lot of information that you can use in your business and in your advertising and in your keyword selection for SEO. Another interesting one that I like is question-type searches. You can look at this over the course of five years like I did. So you can study the What? How? When? Can? and Why? And see the question search volumes increasing constantly. So why is this? Voice searches. Voice searches are getting bigger and bigger.

Now this is just Google data. So we know that Siri on iOS is using Bing for voice searches and those sorts of things. So presumably those would be going up on Bing. These are primarily Google Now searches, searches on Android, those sorts of things. It’s trending upwards.

So if you want to have a look at where you should be focusing, or what’s happening in the news or what you could possibly news-jack, Google Trends is a fantastic tool for that. Just remember, if you’re a retailer, Amazon has 43% of sales online in the U.S. last year.

Hopefully that’s helpful. See you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.