Using Google Trends to Plan Your Show Content

Fuzz Martin 0:00

Good Morning, Podcasters! Today I'm going to help you improve how you research topics for your show.

Fuzz Martin 0:10

catcher for the first time in: 2023

Fuzz Martin 0:57

Who am I? I'm your new host, Fuzz Martin, and three times a week I explore things related to marketing, public relations, social media, and advertising, and talk about how you can incorporate them into your podcast. How do I know all this stuff? I do it for a living, though, mostly in non podcast related situations.

Fuzz Martin 1:18

On today's episode, I'm going to be discussing Google Trends, and how you can use that tool to plan your content for your show. And more specifically, to plan content that people are already searching for. Let's start at the top level. What is Google Trends? (By the way, it's always funny to say what is and then have a word that ends at an S.) But what is Google Trends? Google Trends is a free tool from Google that allows users to see how often certain search terms are being entered into Google Search relative to the total search volume over a given period of time. It gives you data on the popularity of search terms, as well as how they've trended over time. It also allows you to compare how popular different search terms are, and see how they vary by location. This can be useful for coming up with show topics or what parts of a topic you should be exploring. It can also be very useful in comparing search terms to see how you should word your show titles, descriptions, or even what you're working into your language so that it shows up in your transcriptions. You are transcribing your show, right? You should be.

Fuzz Martin 2:29

So how can you use Google Trends for your show? First, go to trends.google.com. It's free. Next, enter a search term that's related to your podcast topic. For example, let's say you have a podcast about fire safety. If you type a fire safety into Google Trends, it will pull up a bunch of data. First, we see a graph of interest over time. I see in this graph that October is the most searched month for fire safety, which makes sense, because that's Fire Safety Month. So if you were considering a specific show topic on fire safety, October would be an optimal month for you to publish that content. Or if your entire show is about fire safety, then you might consider going heavy on content during that month. See, that's how you can use Google Trends to help influence your shows content.

Fuzz Martin 3:23

If you scroll down further, you can see interest by sub region. Vermont and Alaska really like fire safety in the US worldwide, United Arab Emirates and the Philippines search for fire safety quite often. Below that we see related topics and related queries. related queries has a ton of great information, I see a number of rising topics that would be good for a show about fire safety. Here I see fire safety for kids, South Coast fire and safety, I assume that's a specific Fire Company. Three, what is the purpose of safety data sheets for when it's Fire Safety Week, and five, fire safety coloring sheets. So you could do an episode about each of these topics, except for fire safety coloring sheets, but you could create a branded fire safety coloring sheet for your show and make it available to anyone for free since it's a high volume search term. And it will get people coming to your show through organic search.

Fuzz Martin 4:23

If you change the drop down from rising to top, it changes from the topics that are growing to the ones that are already at the top during your search range. So now in changing that, I can see topics like what kind of fires can safely be put out with water. You can easily think of adjacent topics like what cannot be put out with water or how do you put out a chemical fire. You can use the compare tool to check different terms to see which is performing better or which performs better during a given period of time. If you do a pop culture show, you could go to the hamburger menu and click trending searches, which will give you the top searches as of right now. So as I'm recording this, I see the Mega Millions jackpot hits 785 million in time for the first drawing of the year, more than 1 million people have searched about Mega Millions. Today. Obviously a lot of people are searching for Pope Benedict since he recently passed away. And a lot of people are talking about college football. In fact, more than 2 million people have searched for college football today. And it doesn't just have to be pop culture. If you do a show on cybersecurity. For instance, there's currently a top trending article about how LastPass customers recently had their data breached fun.

Fuzz Martin 5:45

Oh, and here's another cool thing when you're exploring a keyword. So if you go back to explore topics, and you type in a keyword, it defaults to web search. But you can click the filters at the top to change that to a news search or even YouTube search. So it will tell you the top trending searches on YouTube, or the top trending searches on Google News. Instead of all of Google, you can also change the date range, choose which categories you want to stick to like science, travel, etc. And again, you can change the location. So all of those are super helpful for planning your shows because you're going to be making content about what people are already searching for. And therefore hopefully increasing the number of organic searches that find your topic and your show.

Fuzz Martin 6:35

So if you're stuck trying to find a topic, you want to find better topics. Or if you want to improve a topic that you're already working on for your podcast, hop on to trends.google.com and start researching today. It's a lifesaver

Fuzz Martin 6:51

Thank you for listening to Good Morning, Podcasters! I hope this topic was helpful for you. If not, I'll go back and research something better. And give you a better episode. Your episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can see all the episodes that goodmorningpod.com. That's goodmorningpod.com. If you have a podcaster friend, please recommend Good Morning, Podcasters to them as well. And be sure to follow the show by clicking the follow button in your pod player. You know how to do it. You're a podcaster and thanks in advance. We'll talk to you again on Wednesday. Right here on the all-new Good Morning, Podcasters!