How you can use Google Trends for small business marketing ideas
Google Trends is a free tool that shows what people are actually searching for, in Australia, in a specific state, or globally, and how that’s changed over weeks, months or years. Most business owners have heard of it. Very few use it properly, which is a shame, because reading it correctly can genuinely change how a business grows.
Here’s the clearest example I have: I used exactly this method to spot a shift in consumer behaviour behind a scooter rental business, which helped grow it into a $1M+ operation. I’ll walk through the method itself first, then the full story.
What a search trend actually looks like
Here’s a real example from a few years ago, during COVID lockdowns, when searches for baking bread, learning to bake, and bread machines spiked to their highest volume in over three years. The specific topic is old news now, supermarket shelves are long since restocked, but the pattern is exactly what to look for: a sudden, sustained spike tied to a real shift in what people needed, not a random blip. That same kind of pattern is playing out on some topic right now, whatever you’re reading this on. Finding it is the whole exercise.
When a trend like that shows up, the underlying searches usually look something like: how long to bake bread, how to make bread from scratch, best bread machine, bread machine reviews. Each one is a distinct piece of content demand, and each type of business can respond differently:
- A news or content site could cover how people are adapting, share recipes, or interview someone with genuine expertise.
- A review site could compare bread machines, flours, or bakery options head to head.
- An ecommerce store could stock related products, bundle a recipe guide with a purchase, or run a themed promotion.
- A business in an adjacent category (a cooking school, for instance) could offer a one-off session on the trending topic to bring in a new audience.
The principle stays the same regardless of industry: find a genuine shift in what people need, then meet it specifically, rather than guessing.
How to turn a trend into content that can actually rank
Once you’ve found a real trend, search the term yourself and look at what’s already occupying the results page:
- Ads, sometimes a gap here is a genuine opportunity for cheap, fast exposure if nobody’s currently bidding.
- AI Overviews, increasingly the first thing shown for informational searches, worth checking what sources it’s currently pulling from and citing, since that tells you what kind of content is earning that visibility right now.
- Featured snippets or recipes, shown when a site has implemented the right structured data (schema markup) for Google to understand exactly what’s on the page.
- People Also Ask, genuinely one of the most useful sections here, it shows you the related questions real people have, each one a content opportunity.
- Videos, worth considering if you’re trying to break into a new topic, since video results increasingly compete for the same attention text content does.
- Top stories, recent news coverage of the topic, useful for understanding the current angle being covered.
Google weighs more than 200 ranking factors, so being first to write about a trending topic doesn’t guarantee a first-page result. What these SERP elements show you is what’s currently working for that specific search, which is the actual brief to work from.
Why copying what's already ranking isn't enough
A trending topic can easily have well over a billion competing search results. If your content just repeats what’s already there, there’s no reason for Google, or a reader, to choose yours over an established page that’s already answering the same question.
This is where understanding the data properly matters more than the trend itself. Look at the variations and related searches around the main topic, not just the headline term, and think about which specific angle nobody else has covered well.
A general news site might focus on answering the practical problems people are hitting, rather than competing directly with an established recipe site. An ecommerce store might spot an adjacent product opportunity nobody else in the category has picked up on yet. That specific, unclaimed angle is usually worth more than trying to out-rank an already-dominant result on the exact same topic.
The real story: how this method grew a business to $1M+
A scooter rental business in Sydney came to me with the obvious assumption: their customers were travellers, people whose own bike was in for a service, or people getting their learner’s licence. Every competitor in the category was built around exactly those assumptions and the keywords to match.
Digging into the actual search and consumer behaviour data told a different story. The real growth driver was the boom in food delivery work, Uber Eats, Menulog, Deliveroo, and the demand it created for low-cost, no-commitment weekly scooter rentals from people who needed a bike to start earning immediately.
I rebuilt the website content, site structure, keyword targeting, Google Ads, Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace listings, and social media communications around that specific insight. The fleet grew past 200 bikes, a second location opened in Melbourne and the business reached page one for “Uber Eats scooter rental,” ahead of Uber, Ridely and other companies that had been in the category for years. Read the full case study.
That’s the actual payoff of using Google Trends and search data properly: not just content ideas, but a genuine read on what’s actually driving demand, sometimes a completely different reason than the one every competitor in your category has assumed.
If you want help finding the real trend behind your own category, get in touch and I’ll dig into the data with you. I look for the real consumer behaviour hiding behind the obvious assumption, not just the keyword everyone else in a category is already chasing. If you want to know what’s actually driving demand for your business, see how I could help.
