Part of having a successful online store is having products that people actually want to buy. Sure, you think your product(s) are great, but are people actually looking to buy what you have to offer? If only you could get on page 1 of Google, right? the problem is that people may not be looking for what you have to sell. How do you know?
Google Trends is a free tool that lets you know if your product is popular in the searches being made by others on the Internet. More importantly, it shows you how a subject is trending over time. As a rule of thumb, if you see that your product is on a downhill slope in regard to search volume, it’s not a good sign — this is not a trending product, and you should look elsewhere. Not doing this is a mistake made by most entrepreneurs, and then they wonderwhy their website isn’t performing. Let’s take a look at an example:
Here I’ve actually run a comparison search: jalapenos and gourmet food. As you can see, the trend for gourmet foods as a search term has declined steadily over time, while the interest in jalapenos has increased. If you are selling gourmet foods with jalapenos as an ingredient, simply shifting the focus of your keywords could have a huge impact. Google Trends is a great tool that more entrepreneurs should take advantage of.
Here’s another example: house cleaning vs. maid services. As you can see, the term house cleaning gets a lot more action then maid services – if you have a cleaning business and you are advertising it as maid services, perhaps it is time to re-think how you are marketing yourself.
Now let’s assume that you want to target your cleaning services to people who rent out their homes or vactaion homes when they aren’t using them. Let’s do a comparison between AirBNB, VRBO, and Vacation Rentals.
Clearly, AirBNB is more “trending” than VRBO (which follows almost the exact graph of “vacation rentals”). Here’s the thing: you can’t force people to be interested in what you are selling. That is one problem with relying on Google searches as your primary marketing tool. What if you could instead generate interest in your products by targeting people that match your ideal customer? This in fact is possible using Facebook ads – you could display your ads for gourmet food to people who are interested in jalapenos or house cleaning services to people interested in AirBNB (for example).
If you would like a complimentary consultation about how to use Google Trends combined with Facebook Ads for your business, give WebStores Ltd a call at 877-924-1414.