Is search traffic for your industry rising or dropping? How can you tell? How will that affect your overall marketing strategy?
In this blog Senior SEO Digital Strategist, Eric Solomon, will cover different ways you can measure market demand to determine whether search traffic is going up or down based on search volume.
What We’ll Cover:
- What is Share of Search?
- 3 Tools to Measure Share of Search
- 8 Ways to Identify Market Trends in Your Industry
My Expert Thoughts on Share of Search
Understanding search demand and how you capture it is critical in search engine optimization and for market research.
93% of all website traffic comes from Google and other search engines. Knowing which keywords matter most will help you appeal to demand in your industry.
There’s no shortage of tools available to help you check search volume. There is Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, and SEMRush, among others.
By looking at metrics like share of search and overall search volume, you can gradually improve your SEO strategy. This approach also helps you understand market trends.
What is Share of Search?
Share of search is a metric that measures the number of organic search queries a specific business receives. It compares this to the search queries of other businesses within the same industry. You can use this metric to determine your brand’s visibility in search results, compared to competitors.
If you want to know how to measure share of search, you can do so using the following basic formula:
Total # of organic search queries for your brand / Total # of organic search queries for all brands = Share of search (SoS)
Share of search works together with other key metrics like market share to help you gauge your brand’s competitiveness.
Measuring it can show you where your business stands within your industry. It also helps identify what steps you need to take to maximize your brand’s online visibility and connection with target audiences.
What is Search Demand?
What about search demand? Put simply, search demand refers to your search traffic potential. It is the estimated traffic your niche has, which is based on the search volume of the keywords in your business and in your industry.
You want to ensure your niche market has a big enough audience to provide a significant return on your investment, whether that be time, capital, or content creation efforts.
Thankfully, there are plenty of free tools available that can help you measure search demand and other key metrics.
Tools to Measure Your Share of Search
So, what tool would you use to measure search volumes on Google and other platforms? Let’s look at a few of the best ones:
1. Google Trends
Google Trends is one of the most powerful marketing insight and SEO tracking tools out there to measure market demand.
While traditional research tools focus on delivering exact-match monthly keyword volume, Google Trends was designed to build visual, dynamic insights that detail the lifecycle of a keyword—past, present, and potential future. It can also help you identify general trends in particular areas of your industry.
You can use Google Trends for:
- Visual, Dynamic Insights: Google Trends provides visual graphs and timelines that show how interest in a keyword has changed over time. This helps marketers identify trends and predict future behavior.
- Historical Analysis: The ability to analyze trends over several years is critical. It helps you decide which trends are long-term and which are seasonal. This insight allows for strategic decisions in content planning and keyword targeting.
- Keyword Comparisons: Comparing multiple keywords helps you select the best-performing ones to target based on popularity patterns, even if certain keywords have short-term spikes in volume.
- Related Keywords: The tool suggests related keywords and highlights terms experiencing exponential growth (e.g., marked as “breakout”), signaling new trends that may be less competitive, but highly valuable.
- Geographic Targeting: Google Trends offers location-based insights. These allow businesses to tailor their strategies to regions where demand for their products or services is higher.
- Market Assessment: This tool is useful for conducting market assessments. This helps businesses anticipate industry shifts, craft timely content, and take advantage of new trends.
2. Google Keyword Planner
Built into the Google Ads interface, Google’s Keyword Planner is one of the main Google tools used for assessing search volume today.
It combines two popular Google Ads tools—the Keyword Tool and the Google Keyword Traffic Estimator—and adds an integrated workflow to help users navigate the process of finding keywords to create campaigns for their business.
Simply log into the Keyword Planner tool with your Google Ads account and enter a keyword to see its metrics along with others for related queries. While the tool’s estimates aren’t perfect, they can give you a good idea of what kind of demand a keyword has.
- Search Volume Analysis: This tool allows for local and global keyword search volume analysis by enabling users to target locally relevant keywords in specific service areas or broader keywords for international audiences.
- Competitive Analysis: Marketers can use Keyword Planner to see competition levels (Low, Medium, High) for keywords, which helps in assessing the difficulty of ranking or bidding for a term in Google Ads.
- Historical Metrics and Forecasting: By referring to historical data you can analyze trends and predict future performance. The Forecasts section shows expected clicks and impressions for running ads on selected keywords over a 30-day period.
- Calculate the ROI of Campaigns: With the help of Forecasts, you can predict the potential ROI of your campaigns based on how your targeted keywords are likely to perform.
- Keyword Suggestions: This tool can generate keyword ideas by analyzing a URL, offering insights into competitors’ strategies and opportunities for improvement.
- Content Strategy Planning: Use Keyword Planner to help you find terms to include in blog posts, web pages, and other content that align with demand trends and boost organic and paid traffic.
3. SEMRush & Other Similar Tools
In learning how to check search volume on Google, you may also use Semrush and other similar third-party tools to measure share of search and search demand.
SEMRush was created to address multiple facets of digital marketing and competitive research, offering everything you need to accurately measure search demand with its Google keyword traffic estimator.
Using national-level data, SEMRush’s keyword tool shows you how many times a keyword was searched over the last 12 months. You can see what the search volume is today and even go back three months, six months, etc.
To check Google search volume, SEMRush utilizes machine learning algorithms and petabytes of accumulated data pulled from search engines.
In fact, their total number of keywords in their software suite has surpassed 16.4 billion, making it the largest keyword database in the world.
What tool would you use to measure volume outside of Semrush and Google? Here are a few others:
8 Ways to Identify Market Demand Trends and Capitalize on Share of Search
You must also know how to calculate the market demand in your industry to see what people want from companies like yours.
1. Use Organic Search Reports in Google Analytics
One reliable tool you can use to measure organic search is Google Analytics 4, or GA4.
A cool feature of GA4 is the ability to set custom alerts for traffic spikes and drops, which can indicate when you might need to make some changes to your keyword strategy. They could also let you know about the effects of Google’s algorithm updates.
2. Set Up Google Analytics Benchmark Reports
Benchmarking is one of the most useful tools in SEO Google Analytics.
Benchmark reports look at your site’s performance, as well as how it’s trending within your industry. It’s important to note that stats are pulled from the entire industry, not your niche within the industry. High traffic levels in the benchmark data may be reflective of top-performing competitors, not necessarily comparable smaller competitors.
You can compare your site’s performance by channel (e.g., organic, direct, referral), location (regional vs. global data), and device (desktop, mobile, tablet). This helps pinpoint areas where you might be underperforming or excelling compared to others.
These are some of the insights you can expect to receive from Google’s benchmark reports:
- Industry Snapshot: Understand general industry trends and where your site stands relative to the competition.
- Growth Potential: Analyze which markets or channels show growth opportunities based on industry benchmarks.
- Market Complexity: Evaluate how competitive or accessible a particular market is before expanding efforts.
- Competitor Identification: While you won’t get direct competitor data, benchmark reports give you an idea of how your competition might be performing in the industry.
3. Do Your Own Manual Keyword Research to Measure Share of Search
In discovering how to find what people are searching for on Google, there are other tools that allow for manual research.
For example, you could visit industry-relevant forums and see what topics people are discussing in various threads, which could also give you some keyword ideas.
Additionally, social media platforms where your audiences spend their time may give you some more ideas as people or competitors post about various trending topics.
Competitor blogs might also tell you what your shared audiences care about, especially if you’re able to see engagement metrics for those blogs.
4. Pay Attention to Google Ads Automated Insights
In GA4, the “Intelligence Events” feature from UA has been replaced by “Analytics Insights” and “Custom Insights.” These tools utilize machine learning to help you monitor significant changes and anomalies in your website’s data.
- Analytics Insights: Automatically detects trends and anomalies in your data, providing insights without manual configuration. You can view these insights on the Analytics Home page or within specific reports.
- Custom Insights: Create personalized alerts based on specific conditions, such as a percentage increase or decrease in traffic, conversions, or session duration.
While Google tends to measure larger changes in data, Analytics Insights and Custom Insights features in GA4 provide a more advanced, machine-learning-powered way to monitor and understand your website’s performance.
Here’s some examples:
- A clothing retailer might notice a spike in demand for seasonal products like winter coats and adjust inventory or campaigns accordingly.
- A business selling running shoes might identify trends like growing interest in “running clubs,” providing opportunities to target niche audiences or related keywords.
5. Use Google Autosuggest
A great tool you can use to get some ideas for keywords is Google’s autosuggest feature, which entails simply entering a keyword into Google and seeing what other users are looking for around that term.
When using autosuggest, explore some broader search queries and see what long-tail versions show up for that term. To narrow things down, continue to expand on that short-tail term and see more granular trending topics.
6. Try Google’s “People Also Search For”
Another tool right on the search platform is “People also search for,” which appears at the bottom of each search engine results page.
Then, use tools like Keyword Planner to see the search volume for each term you’d like to target.
7. Explore Search Console Data
If you want to measure the performance of specific queries on your website, another option is Google Search Console.
Using the data collected in your Search Console reports, you can clearly see key metrics for keywords based on your goals, including total clicks and impressions, along with your average position and click-through rates.
Based on this data, you can figure out which terms are helping you earn more share of search and which need some more optimization. They might also indicate the popularity and search demand for certain keywords.
8. Give AI-Powered Tools a Try
With innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) helping marketers in many ways, keyword research is also benefitting from these tools.
Among AI tools’ many other applications, you can use ChatGPT, Bard, and others to help refine your keyword research.
For example, you could begin by using an AI chat tool to look for popular industry topics in your industry, which might give you ideas for one or more blog posts.
You may then use the same tool to help you find related keywords for a certain term, helping you narrow down your optimization efforts.
Maximize Share of Search and Performance With Ignite Visibility
Knowing how to get more share of search and appeal to search demand is everything in SEO. If you’re in a competitive industry where doing so on your own isn’t so easy, you may benefit from teaming up with Ignite Visibility. Not only can we help with keyword research and other SEO tasks, but we can also assist you with everything from content marketing to reporting and analytics in a holistic digital marketing strategy.
Not sure of the advantages of working with us? Here are just some of the ways we can fully optimize your efforts:
- Identify industry and keyword trends
- Conduct in-depth keyword research
- Predict the ROI for your keyword and overall SEO strategy
- Create high-quality content around trending topics with naturally incorporated keywords
- Continually track performance and optimize performance
- And more!
If you think this might be right for you, contact us today and find out what all we’re ready to do for you.
