How to Find the Next Big Thing with Google Trends

Key Takeaways

Look for exponential patterns at an early stage
Keep an eye for convergences on an already established trend
Find early clues like the sudden appearance of something new in top rising queries, things which have others’ attention like organic influencer mentions or forum discussion.
Viral content without any paid ads behind them
Trend patterns with higher highs and lows for seasonal queries and events

Over the past few months, we at TimesNext decided to change how we looked at startup news and redirected our offerings. Previously, we used to report the latest stories, and that was pretty much it.

Nonetheless, it has been a while since we started sharing our opinion, narrating the entire story, and offering insights to paint an in-depth overview of the matter. The new approach gave us another direction – to find new trends, the next big thing, and present them to you.

Ever since we started sharing the latest trends and new business opportunities, several people have asked us to look for trends that could explode.

There are multiple approaches, but one of the most common and the one we use the most (and also free) is Google Trends.

We consider Google Trends the best research tool for businesses and entrepreneurs. The tool is invaluable for everything, be it finding the next big thing, SEO purposes, or investing.

Google is the biggest search engine out there with over 90% market share (1). That’s why it can reflect what the general population is aware of, what they care for, what their intentions are to buy next, and so forth.

Even though Google Trends may not capture everything like which sites are getting a huge amount of direct traffic or stats of early-stage startups, it is an excellent tool one can use at no cost as an entrepreneur.

Google Trend (2) solves bigger issues such as the demand for something, or if there is a demand for anything at all, it tells you what people are searching for.

As someone once said (3),

“you need to look at what people are doing and not what they are saying.”

However, often people end up using Google Trends in sloppy ways to spot new trends.

For instance, many take the top 25 breakout queries for a topic, scan through them, and observe their plotting over time. It is a time-consuming process and not even specific enough to gain something relevant. And since they usually only show sudden spikes for low absolute volumes, monthly searches, they are so often near zero.

In addition, if you chose to opt for such a manual method, you may get better quality results over the long term, it would still not be a perfect approach (4, 5).

There are multiple smart ways to use the tool. Hence, today, we have chosen to discuss how you can leverage Google Trends and use it to detect what may become an excellent business or industry.

What is Google Trends?

Google, the tech giant, had rolled out Google Trends in 2006 (6). In 2008, Google had rolled out another platform for SEO purposes named Google Insight (7). Then, the tech giant blended these two platforms and reformed them into a new platform, the Google Trend we use today.

The company evolved the product to offer business owners and content creators real-time data about trending topics, industries, keywords, geography, etc., where specific topics get the most searches. It offers information by pulling data from the Google search engine at any time.

Below are some of the key features Google Trends offer when we look for any particular search term:

Interest over time: The feature offers a visual representation of your search term’s popularity via chart. Google Trends also allows users to change the time frame to get search data for the past 24 hours, months, years, or since the beginning. You can also put your custom time frame.
Interest by region: The feature shows you the demographic regions where people search most for your term. You can also choose any specific subregion, a specific nation, or carry out a worldwide search.
Related topics: In this section, you can see the five most real-time relevant popular search topics.
Related queries: The section offers the five most relevant topics and questions related to your search term at the time.

Leveraging Google Trends for Your Business

You can use Google Trends in multiple ways for your business, including but not limited to (8, 9)

reviewing how you compare to your competitors
building and establishing an online brand identity
revise marketing strategy as per new trends
to purchase and sell the right products
searches for a specific region or specific time frame
estimating the future trend for a particular keyword
compare searches for different keywords in different regions and track their evolution over time
save all the obtained data in an Excel sheet and conveniently access it across all your devices.
Google Trends is the closest thing to Twitter’s trending topic list. It shows the most searched topics that are trending and lists them according to relevance.

With Google Trends, businesses can search the name of their competitors and see which topics and keywords people are searching most about, what are their subregion and related queries. Google Trends also offers a compare feature, allowing you to add your business to compare with your competitors and know whose products people are searching for more.

In addition, you can also use it to update your marketing strategies to rank better than your rivals for SEO purposes.

Another excellent way to use Google Trends for business is to establish and build a company’s brand identity. It is because the platform allows people to find trending keywords and topics. You can implement those topics and keywords in your content, such as articles, website copy, blog posts, social media posts, etc., and leverage them to increase brand awareness.

Depending on current events and popular trends, businesses can also build seasonal campaigns and offer fresh content that matches public perception at a specific period. Moreover, if a business already has a running marketing campaign, the marketing department can use the data to monitor the effectiveness of their camping.

And since Google Trends allow businesses to search for real-time interest of people, it also acts as a potential indicator of whether a company should buy a particular inventory. It should continue selling a particular product.

For instance, suppose you are selling handbags of two different brands, you can go to Google Trends to see which of the two brands are more popular among your customers. If one is gaining significantly more search queries than the other, your business may get a better return on investment by increasing the inventory of the more popular brand.

How to Use Google Trends?

If you are new to using Google Trends, we will discuss the general and most basic but still effective ways to use Google Trends in this section. You can go ahead and jump on the next section if already versed.

The first way to use Google Trends is to review trending topics on the landing page of the Google Trend. You can check the latest stories and insights section on Google Trends. In this section, you can see data about real-time events and trends worldwide.

Moreover, as we mentioned above, you can also review the timeframe in the search option and review top trends from previous years.

You can also check your industry name as a keyword on the search section of Google Trends to find the top trending topics at the moment.

For instance, suppose you won a local bank. In that case, you can search for the “finance industry” to find relevant topics like financial planning, net income, investor relations, etc. Then, you can use these top keywords in your blog posts, how-to videos, infographics, and other content forms to increase your site’s traffic.

As we referred to at the start of the article, Google Trends also allows you to search for any topic based on the subregion. It means if you are running a small business and the bulk of your customers are from a small town or a single state, you can adjust your search via inserting your specific location into the location tan at the top of the page.

It will allow you to find what people search for in your area and see other relevant keywords and topics. For example, suppose you are an owner of a coffee shop in a small town and notice that most related search topics in your area include the best coffee beans or at-home latte tutorials. In that case, you can create content that associates your business with the most searched terms.

Google Trends is also an excellent tool for people looking to go niche. For example, if you are running a recruitment firm and search for the recruitment industry, you may find top searched terms like payroll management, independent employee benefit programs, etc. From these search results, you can decide to expand your services to include payroll management. Adopting such strategies can make your business more appealing as you offer an additional service they are looking for.

In short, by taking advantage of free tools like Google Trends, you can take your business to the next phase by meeting the demands of the latest trends and expanding your business to new markets (10, 11).

Using Google Trends to Find the Latest Business Opportunity

As we discussed, there are multiple layers when it comes to Google it, and once you figure out how to use them, you can leverage the tool to find what may become the next big thing in an industry or your business (12, 13).

Pattern Filters

One of the most effective methods to use Google Trend is an exponential filter to look for rising queries from different keywords you select.

Once you get an output, you can look at absolute volumes and see what happened over the last 12 months. Then, visit the Google search engine’s first page to check whether a brand or business is already killing the market. Next, figure out major Y-o-Y growth, customer loyalty, cult following, forums and discussions, proven user numbers, and revenue.

If you get high volume, it doesn’t necessarily mean the space is too competitive or bad; rather, there is a huge demand. The market mostly has multiple gaps or pain points that you can leverage to either enter the space or grow your existing business.

If there is a gap, the key is to build a brand around the niche or major points your target audience can relate with. Then go broader from there.

Use Google Trends as a tool to spark an idea, conduct research, and then you can decide which are your areas of interest and how to move forward from there.

Convergence

Another effective approach to Google Trends is convergence. It means a smaller trend is starting to converge on the amount of search interest for a well-established or bigger trend.

When such trends converged to a much larger % of interest and start to tip over 5 to 10% and keeps rising, it is usually an excellent sign that something is about to be a much bigger trend.

And since Google Trends is a relative tool and indexed, it won’t tell you the absolute volumes. Hence, always remember to check those keyword tools like Ahrefs or any tool of your choice.

We often check our keywords over the last 12 months and see a rising interest in its search volumes. Even finding these at low levels is excellent since you would be spotting an emerging trend that won’t be on many people’s radar yet.

For instance, look for 1k searches in January, 2k in March, 4k in May, and so on.

Early Clues

Often, Google Trends won’t show you something that would be bigger for any reason. Even so, more often than not, there are some little early clues you need to watch out for.

For instance, if you consistently see something in the top rising queries for a niche, you need to pay attention to it if you have not seen it before.

It could be a new brand getting early venture funding or their initial press piece. Suppose you see the company and its offers looking compelling, if any influencers or celebrities are endorsing them organically, interest on Reddit, etc. In that case, it is likely to get more prominent, and it may start showing up.

In addition, if a trend is getting a big search spike without any paid campaigns, it indicates that the topic can create virality which can get bigger. Another early clue to look for is seasonal things, starting a higher high or higher lows pattern.

Veganism is one such trend exhibiting this pattern, seeing higher highs and lows since 2004 and onwards (14, 15).

Final Remarks

With rising consumer demands and Google sophisticating its algorithm, we have reached a point when utilizing Google Trends has become more valuable than ever.

If you are ready to roll up your sleeves and venture beyond the basic search, you will find unique insights that can transform your brand and SEO for the better.

If you haven’t already, Google Trends is one of the best tools for SEO, and you should check it right away. Notably, Google has a ravening appetite for fresh appetite. Google Trends is a superior tool for creating new business and content ideas to garner links, traffic, etc.

That’s our take on how you can use Google Trends to build your brand and business. We trust that you have found our guide interesting and helpful.

Reach out to us in the comment section down below for any queries. We look forward to hearing from you!