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How to Use Google Trends to Find Content Ideas for Free

This week, let’s review a free and easy way to get content ideas for your blog using Google Trends. For SEO purposes, your dealership should be regularly publishing quality content. Here’s how you can get started finding quality content ideas without spending a dime or spending too much time doing so.

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To start, let’s explore some broad topics and see if we can find anything worth writing about. In this example, let’s head over to Google Trends and search for something broad like “Honda.” 

Due to the regionality of car-buying habits, click on your state under the heading “Interest by subregion.” This is important because northern states may prioritize things like SUVs and vehicles with all-wheel-drive to handle snow, and rural states may prioritize pickups for rural work.

Google Trends Screenshot

The image above are the results for “Honda” when filtered by Arizona as a subregion. We are also looking at results from the past 90 days. Looking at the past 90 days is important because we want to find queries that are more recently trending.

From here, let’s look at the bottom-right card titled “Related queries.” I like to keep the drop-down here set to Rising, because it indicates which queries are growing. A result of “Breakout” means that the query has grown by over 5000%. These queries can be great to target.

In this example, we can see that the queries “honda civic type r” and “2021 honda ridgeline” have increased by 80% and 60% respectively in the last 90 days when compared to the previous time period.

In the box to the left title “Related topics,” we can see that interest in the Honda Civic Hatchback has grown over 1,000% in the last 90 days. This is a hot topic. 

Using what we’ve found so far, we should probably write about the Honda Civic Hatchback and definitely mention ‘honda civic type r’ in our text. If you’d like to take it a step further, you could click into the Honda Civic Hatchback topic to view queries on that topic.

As the topics get more specific, you may find that there isn’t enough data for your region. When this happens, set Google Trends to explore that topic in your country.

Google Trends Screenshot

The above image explores “Honda Civic Hatchback” as a topic over the last 90 days in the United States. We’ve clicked through to view more potential topics and related queries. In this example, we can see that queries on the “2022 Honda Civic Hatchback” are up 800% over the last 90 days when compared to the previous 90 days.

I think at this point we have enough to get started with our content. Before we get started though, first consider which part of the buying journey people who will consume this type of content are on. This is important because we can further tailor our content to this type of shopper.

Here’s what we have so far:

  • We should write about the Honda Civic Hatchback
  • More specifically, we should talk about the 2022 Honda Civic Hatchback
  • We also know that searches in our area are up significantly for the Honda Civic Type R, so let’s make sure we write a lot about that.
  • All of these sharp trends indicate that there was likely news out about this product, so let’s review that to make sure we know what’s happening.

Now get started writing about that 2022 Honda Civic Hatchback!

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