Using Google Trends for Your Nonprofit’s Digital Marketing Strategy

Knowing what relevant topics are trending at any given time can benefit your nonprofit in a variety of ways. Google Trends is a platform that allows you to view current trending topics, which can be a helpful tool for creating the most interesting and relevant social media posts, blog posts, and other aspects of your nonprofit's digital marketing strategy.  

5 Ways to Use Google Trends to Improve Your Nonprofit's Digital Marketing Strategy

Although every nonprofit's digital marketing strategy is unique, using Google Trends to determine what your audience is the most interested in at any given time can give you a significant advantage when it comes to creating content that will pique their interest. Here are five helpful ways any nonprofit can take incorporate Google Trends into its digital marketing strategy!

Boost Your Content Marketing Strategy 

Google Trends can play a key role in improving a wide range of aspects of your nonprofit's content marketing strategy. Knowing what topics your followers are searching for can help you identify the best topics for your blog posts and other aspects of your content marketing strategy. This can be particularly important when it comes to determining what types of longer content will keep your audience's attention long enough to commit to spending several minutes reading a piece. 

Improve Your SEO Rankings 

Knowing what your target audience is both currently searching for and no longer interested in is essential when it comes to making sure your content aligns with what they are looking for. Understanding how keyword seasonality and long tail keywords work is an important step in strategically selecting options that tell Google that your content is the most likely to benefit your audience and deserves a place on the first page of search results. Many searchers never look further than the first few pages of search results or will not click past the first page at all, and choosing the right keywords is an important step in obtaining strong SEO rankings.

The precise data that is used to determine Google's SEO algorithm is constantly changing, which means that staying on top of the latest details is much more likely to give you the results you want than depending on what worked well even a few months ago. Google Trends gives you a convenient way to both analyze emerging trends and determine which older trends are no longer relevant and unlikely to give you the same results you used to get. 

Get the Most Out of Your Paid Advertising Budget 

Although paid advertising is generally a must when it comes to getting the word out about your business, many nonprofits are working within a relatively limited budget. Google Trends and other tools can provide insights into ways your business can choose the most important ways to make your advertising dollars stretch as far as possible. 

Much like your SEO strategy, much of getting your digital advertising in front of the right audience depends on getting your keywords and long tail keywords just right. Keeping track of emerging keyword trends and making sure your content contains the right combinations of keywords can be an important step in making sure the people who are the most likely to be interested in the advertising you spend money creating have the chance to see it at all and benefit from taking advantage of your business. 

Create More Professional Social Media Pages

Modern social media pages need more than sporadic photos that provide little value to your followers to stay competitive. Google Trends can help your business determine the most relevant topics to post about. Determining what topics people interested in your industry are searching for can help you create videos, photos, and other content that stands out, and creating social media feeds that are an adequate blend of entertaining and informative is an important step in keeping your followers in the loop about everything that is going on at your business.

Social media trends can change quickly, and combining Google Trends with lists of trending topics that social media pages themselves provide can give your business more ideas to choose from. By honing your skills and selecting the best possible topics, and creating quality posts for each platform, your business can plan well-designed social media pages that provide value to your followers and help you meet your goals. 

Select the Most Relevant Event Topics 

Zeroing in on exactly what material your business's conferences, webinars, videos, and other digital content and in-person events should cover is not always as easy as you might think. Your business has a limited amount of time to capture your target audience's interest and convince potential viewers and attendees that your content provides value to them, and staying aware of the most relevant hot topics within your industry can simplify the process of determining what topics will be the most likely to bring in the traffic you want. Google Trends provides a quick and easy way to determine which topics your audience is the most interested in at any given time. 

Consistently presenting well-planned material on topics that are both interesting and important to your audience can also allow your company to build a reputation as a leader within your industry when it comes to keeping customers, followers, and other businesses informed about the latest news and best practices in your field. 

How to Use Google Trends 

Here is a quick overview of how Google Trends works and how you can incorporate each of its features into your nonprofit's digital marketing strategy!

Explore 

The Explore section of Google Trends allows you to search for the topic you are interested in to find the most relevant trending searches that are related to that topic. Starting here allows you to quickly and conveniently find the trends that are the most relevant to the specific topic you are interested in creating content about. 

Trending Searches 

The Trending Searches page provides the top search results for the current and previous day. You can use this feature to filter top trends by location and even view real-time results. Although these trends will rarely include your nonprofit, you can use this information to create posts that keep your audience engaged by highlighting current events and drive traffic from these search results to your content. 

Year in Search

Your followers may also be interested in something that happened on a particular day in history. The Year in Search page shows you the most relevant search trends from exactly one or more years ago to allow your nonprofit to create content that highlights the anniversary of a particular event. 

Subscriptions 

Identifying how search trends that are relevant to your nonprofit evolve over time can be even more beneficial than manually searching for trends once in a while. Creating a subscription to a specific search term allows Google Trends to automatically send you daily updates for that result. 

At ArcStone, we are here to help you fine-tune your digital marketing strategy to focus on exactly what your audience is looking for. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you use Google Trends to your advantage or any of the other services we offer!