How to use Google Trends for press release headlines

Google provides PR’s with a massive amount of tools for us to understand audiences, public opinion and insights. 

More specifically, Google Trends is an imperative part of the Digital PR toolkit! The site enables us to spend time sifting through global trends and review general interest, yearly increases, searchability and insights. All of these factors open up a vast new world of PR opportunities!

Easy to use and free, the platform allows users to compare keywords and phrases searched by the public. From this, we can instantly calculate the volume of interest globally or nationally.

Ahead of ideation sessions, use the tool to search keywords attached to your client in order to gain insight into what the public is searching for. You can then use this insight to inspire stories or creative campaigns for the client that are likely to rank highly in google thanks to their keywords!

For example, let’s take one of Motive’s clients LeaseElectricCar.co.uk and walk through how I would use the tool to create a national story:

In order to find out what the public are searching for in terms of electric car terms, I keyed the below 4 terms into Google Trends comparison tool. The comparison factors were chosen because I wanted the search to be national and show a comparison of searches over the past 12 months.  

Google Trends establishes a colour associated to each term and trawls the internet for data which is shown in the below ‘interest over time’ comparison chart, where the coloured lines match up with their associated term. 

This provides me with the keyword for my story, as ‘electric car’ was far more searched for over the past 12 months than any of the other terms. The chart shows ‘Hybrid vehicle’ as the least searched for term, which highlights that we should avoid using this term in a story title as it has very low public interest. 

The tool also provides us with the option to show a comparison breakdown of each term per subregion or city, as shown in the below. 

Direct city/subregion comparison is super handy for regional stories.Here, the headline of the story can be tweaked before being pitched to regional papers and publications to include top keywords for that area. 

It's also worth checking out other tools and resources online such as BuzzSumo and DesignRush. Utilising these tools will enable you to get in on the action with some strategic and super relevant PR which can only lead to great coverage and links.

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