What is Google Top Charts, What’s On It and How Can Website Owners Use It To Create Quality Content That Attracts Traffic
Google Trends is the largest catalog of keywords around the world. It is a free, real-time listening tool that identifies the words that are mostly searched by users all over the web. In an SEO perspective, Google Trends helps to know which keyword will be successful in a long time.
What is Google Top Charts?
Google Top Charts is a new feature of Google Trends that gives the users a billboard ranking of the most-searched people, places and things in more than 40 categories. It’s a monthly version of the Year-End Zeitgeist which Google provides annually. Built on Google’s Knowledge Graph, it shows the actual things the searchers are interested in, rather than keywords alone.
What’s on Google Top Charts?
Each category has a top ten list with the following information: a brief Wikipedia entry about the subject, how long they’ve been on the chart, how they’ve changed over time and when they were peaked. Each listed item has a colored bar that signifies its current rating and it has arrows on its side to indicate whether the item has gone up or down since last month. Upon clicking “Explore”, it will bring up the entire history – how many months has it been ranking since 2004, which regions have shown the most interest about the subject and some related terms which are convenient to those looking to strategize their keyword groups and SEO campaigns.
Here’s the complete list of available charts:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Here’s how it was organized based on industry:
- Business & politics
- Entertainment
- Nature & science
- Shopping
- Sports
- Travel & Leisure
Google Top Charts vs. Google Trends
With Top Charts, it’s fairly easy to determine which topics have been steadily popular on a certain category over a period of time. For instance, let’s say you have a website that targets fans who love sports cars. Your site is like a portal that shows the latest photos, expert reviews, ratings and recommendations. If you were to do a traditional keyword research, you’ll have to come up with different brands of sports cars and analyze through Trends which are hot and which are up-and-coming. You’ll have to invest a lot of time to compare and see which terms would be most effective to drive more traffic. With Top Charts, you can see at a glance that Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro and Chevrolet Corvette are the topmost choices and if you click to explore more, you’ll learn about words that you can associate to the brand which you can use to build a good campaign. Bottom line is, keyword research has never been easier.
Google Top Charts vs. Hot Searches
Google points out the difference between two through the Trends Help Center.
Hot Searches is different than Top Charts in a few ways. First, Hot Searches highlights queries that jumped significantly in traffic, whereas Top Charts highlights topics with high overall search volume. Second, Hot Searches is built on real-time data, so it can surface trending topics that are spiking as recently as a half-hour ago. We hope to add real-time data to the rest of Top Charts, but for now the best place to see real-time trends is in Hot Searches.
5 Content Marketing Ideas To Drive More Traffic using Google Top Charts
Whether you’re a website owner, a social media marketing company, or simply an SEO enthusiast, you’ll find that using Google Top Charts can be beneficial to your digital marketing campaign. Here’s how.
1. Featured brands. Based on the intelligence you’ll get from the Top Charts, you can organize your data and strategize which products would catch the consumers’ attention the most. View the last three months and see which has remained consistently in the Top 5. If in case there’s a big jump, say a month ago, you can check right away the cause for this. Perhaps they released a new product line that mainly affected the spike. From this analysis, you can tailor-fit your promotions to make it favorable to your website. You can build a separate landing page to highlight it, set up a gallery or create a viral video aimed to boost brand awareness and your reputation as a review site.
2. Quality blog content. Publish posts that are patterned on what’s popular to Google searchers. If content is king, then quality is queen. Your weblog will be fresh, updated and well-thought of. The readers will love you as you will be blogging about the things they are really involved in. Use your keywords as tags so to make them searchable in the search engines.
3. Well-timed link building and social sharing. As you develop valuable content, more and more people will link to you and share your entries. Timing is very important in the search and social media scene therefore you are building well-timed materials that are being talked about thus, very shareable.
4. Improved traffic and increased readership. Your current followers will be encouraged to make repeat visits. They may even recommend your website as well! As more readers learn about you and your business, you will gain bigger audience. You will attract new subscribers and prospective customers.
5. More-tailored PPC ads. A look at the Top Charts can give you an idea which keywords are good to pursue and which should you modify altogether. If a product is slipping in the Top Charts, this could be a good indicator to rethink and reevaluate your keyword strategy. You can also utilize the rising feature under the Related Terms section to mix and match or test which combinations will give you a higher conversion rate.
Google Top Charts is still relatively new. With its limited options of industry plus its monthly update, it may not be as helpful to those who are targeting niche markets or looking to market to local audiences. At the moment, the search volume is based on United States but once the Knowledge Graph is available locally and Google is confident enough with the data quality, Google will launch new regions and more categories.
References:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/top-charts-in-google-trendsthe-most.html
http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227613
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2270332/Googles-Top-Charts-Offer-Engaging-Visuals-for-Popular-Searches-Over-Time
http://www.webpronews.com/google-trends-gets-new-top-charts-for-trends-by-category-2013-05
