Google Trends is a search marketing tool that can be used to help plan your online marketing and advertising efforts. When it comes to search marketing for photographers, you can use this free tool to help you both in planning which terms to target as well as when to market for various topics. If we look at Google Trends for photographers we find that it can be used in a few different ways to help us focus our photography marketing efforts where they will have the best results.
Let’s dive in and find out how to use Google Trends to plan your online marketing for photographers.
How to Use Google Trends to Find the Best Time of Year
Let’s say you want to market to folks who want photos for their Christmas cards. Your intuition would be correct in suspecting that March isn’t the right time… but when does this topic peak in search traffic? Is it in early November? Late November? December?
Head over to Google Trends, put in a search term, such as Christmas card photos specify a date range1, and see what it tells you.
Looks like searches don’t really spike until December. That’s good to know.. you probably don’t want to dump a bunch of marketing energy and/or money into this term in October.
When Do People Search for Family Portraits?
We can use Google Trends for other questions. If you make family portraits, do you when when folks are searching for that?
Here’s what Google Trends tells us:
We see that things are fairly constant until September or October when there’s an upward trend as we approach the holidays.
What About Fine Art?
My previous examples have been for retail photographic services, but what about fine art? Is there a time when folks search for landscape wall art more than others? Ask Google Trends:
Looks like that there are a couple spikes but overall, things are fairly consistent throughout the year. That’s good to know if you’re planning for your photography marketing.
Use Google Trends to Compare Terms
Let’s use Google Trends for another purpose: comparing search volumes based on two different terms that can be used for the same service. After all… in the photography world, we often have similar terms that can mean the same thing. Are they photos or photographs? Do more people search for photography or photographers? Does someone want newborn portraits or newborn photos? Something else entirely?
What do things look like if we compare senior portraits vs. senior pictures?
That’s telling! While we see that the overall shape of the search volume trends are the same throughout the year, there’s a notably higher volume of searches for one term than the other. You might not want to ignore the term senior portraits completely, but you should know that more folks are searching for senior pictures.
Google Trends for Photographers: What Else?
Have you discovered another use for Google Trends for photographers? Drop a comment below so we can all learn together.
- You’ll see for most of my later examples I’ve chosen 2016 as it’s the most recent full year as I wrote this. You can choose another full year, or even part of a year if that makes more sense. Here, I’ve only chosen the end of the year for our pre-Christmas example. ↩
Thanks, very useful