Book Marketing with Google Trends

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and keyword research will make or break your book marketing strategy. If done right, they will increase the discoverability of your blog, its contents, and drive traffic to your site.

Here, we will discuss the importance of using Google Trends for keyword research, which, in addition to being completely free, is also developed by the very company that dominates the search engine world — the search engine every marketing expert is trying to one-up.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a tool that helps you identify trending topics across different industries, showing you popular search terms in comparison to other search terms, which becomes invaluable for in-depth keyword research.

According to the Google Trends Help Center, “Trends adjusts search data to make comparisons between terms easier. Each data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents, to compare relative popularity.”

Since the majority of internet users use Google’s search engine, Google is able to provide a wide array of information based on these searches. Initially developed for the use of journalists, Google Trends is now used by marketers, writers and bloggers, because you have access to graphs for popularity over the ages, maps of regions where it is most popular, and statistics on which related terms are rising in usage. You can filter your keyword search results by country, time frame, categories (Books & Literature) 

How Can You Use Google Trends to Market Your Book?

1. Brainstorm for Blog Posts

Let’s say you need to keep your blog active by writing about something that will attract people’s attention. The best way to do that is to write about what everyone is interested in right now. You can use Google Trends to figure out the current most popular keyword searches. But that’s not all there is to it. Here are some other ways you can integrate Google Trends into your book marketing strategy.

Even better, Google Trends also gives you insights to the topics and queries related to the trending searches, which allows you to expand on your ideas and write about what would intrigue your readers the most.

2. Improve SEO

If you’re already using keyword research tools in your website, cross-checking their info with that offered by Google Trends will enhance the performance of your blog posts. 

“Combine your marketing research efforts with the Google Keyword Planner. This both provides you the direction a particular trend is moving in, as well as the exact search volume that you can expect from this trend,” says Andrew Alexander of Limitless Academy.

3. In Your Social Media Campaign

You put hours of work into designing your social media posts, only to have a few scattered views and zero engagement. So how do you make sure your hard work reaches its target audience?

Through Google Trends, you can easily find the most popular keywords related to your posts and use them as hashtags to increase their discoverability. 

But remember not to use irrelevant hashtags for your posts just because those words are currently trending — that will be considered as spam, and you will be misleading your content viewers.