Trend Analysis & How It Understands Audience Search Behavior

Audience search behavior is something that changes from time to time. However, it is your responsibility to understand it and solve disruptions and changes in user search behavior.

One thing that can be used here while understanding your audience’s search behavior is the use of Trend Analysis. Let us discern the same in the context of SEO tools.

Understanding Trend Analysis

Trend Analysis is all about understanding the underlying causes of your target audience’s decision making and how to clout those in your favor. It can also be understood as fluctuations in users’ search interests. You can effectively conduct a pandemic trend analysis when you aren’t sure where to start. It could be,

A free tool
Your brain
A bit of initiative

Change in audience interests pre-quarantine vs. quarantine search interest

People’s interests have changed both offline and online over the course of quarantine. But how can you know if they have surely changed their behavior?

Google Trends says that you have to look at the search volume data, which is the only robust data point available. You should also focus on what people are delving into amid the impact of COVID-19. To get this insight, you must breakdown the events that might be harmful to your audience’s search patterns. This include,

Travel restrictions- travel industries
Quarantine- On all industries
Financial relief efforts- wealth management, finance, insurance industries, etc
Phase two horizon- all industries
Stay at home order restrictions gradually lift- regional impacts on all industries

The impact of COVID-19 on Search Audiences

The wrath of COVID-19 we all know has been dreadful. Whether it is content marketing or online marketing, it has taken a lot from us. COVID-19 presumably hit your search audiences in the toughest sense, especially in the quarantine and lockdown phase in March 2020. To understand the differences between search interest, Google Trends is the best tool.

Also, Read – Know How To Build Apt SEO Resources For Your Company

Like, search interest in Video games surged after the lockdown. The surge was the largest in the last five years that boosted the user search interest out of a five-year deadline. Apart from video games, lounge clothes, baking, outdoor living, creative expressions were also among the surge, as users supplemented their lives with all these things.

Lounge Clothes: During the December holidays, there was a typical peak in lounge clothes yearly. However, 2020 was a bit different as this peak was observed in March.

Baking: The exponential rise in baking came at the beginning of April 2020.- This was highly uncharacteristic since the typical yearly search interest peak is during the holiday season.

Creative expression: The interest in creative tools have sustained interest year-round with rarely any search interest “surge” times. The surge came in March 2020.

Outdoor living: The peak occurred around May, and a lot depends on the best outdoor experience. However, the peak in 2020 was above the typical steady peaks seen in the last five years.

Turning Trend Insights Int Action Items

Now when you are aware of the impacts of quarantine on your searchers, you can perform things like,

Reactively service their current needs during disruptions
Predicts the need proactively that may result in future disruptions.

Action Items From Trend Insights

Google Trends interest charts are relative to a selected time period. It helps in understanding all related queries like it was witnessed in the frequency related to “video games” due to the disruptor.

Google Trends defines each term as,

“*Top – The most popular search queries. Scoring is on a relative scale where a value of 100 is the most commonly searched query, 50 is a query searched half as often as the most popular query, and so on.

* Rising – Queries with the biggest increase in search frequency since the last period. Results marked “Breakout” had a tremendous increase, probably because these queries are new and had few (if any) prior searches.”

The related queries suggest that the users are looking for video games to connect with their friends and family via video games during the quarantine. Below are the ways games were played during this time,

Video games coronavirus- Breakout

Games to play on video chat- Breakout

Games to play with friends over video call- Breakout

Video games releasing in 2020- Breakout

Most played video games right now- 3700%

Best video games for quarantine- 1500%