3 Ways to Use “Google Trends” For Your New Dental Practice

by Frank Hamilton

It can be challenging as a dentist conducting your market research on both existing and potential clients, especially if your practice is just starting out and is on a tight budget and resources. Things such as keyword tools, customer interviews, surveys, and data collection can be expensive and time-consuming.

Also, more businesses are competing for fewer client dollars and a shorter client attention span. Thus, rising above these challenges has become more difficult. But luckily, Google created the Google Trends tool to help make market research easier and cheaper for businesses. With Google trends, you can access affordable and readily available research data with Google Trends technology.

What Are Google Trends?

Google Trends is a unique trend tool that shows the popularity of search topics and keywords. With several excellent features, it helps you keep track of all the information clients are looking for via the Google search engine. Google Trends lets you in on what trends are on the rise or decline. Also, you can find related topics and queries, and overall demographic insights that can be of benefit in growing your business.

Additionally, Google Trends technology is designed to help you measure brand popularity and a plan for your business. It also helps you to track new tech trends, identify new markets, and communicate in clear terms with your clients.

Now let’s see how to use Google trends to grow your new dental practice.

  1. Find Niche Topics by Region

A great feature on Google Trends is that you can draw up topic search results, including a list of top sub-regions where your topic is more relevant. As a new dental practice owner, most often, your adverts need to be location specific. For our examples, we will focus our search location in Canada, using the 2004- present timeline.

So, let’s say you are still considering the perfect location for your new dental clinic in Canada. When considering adverts for a target audience, indeed, the audience in Alberta province isn’t going to be the same as the audience in Nova Scotia.

Now let’s break down what these two provinces rank for a dental practice using the search term “dental clinic” to find out what region has the highest number of people that search for dental care and services.

3 Ways to Use "Google Trends" For Your New Dental Practice

3 Ways to Use "Google Trends" For Your New Dental Practice

From the above search, Alberta has the third-highest interest in the “dental clinic” search term; this isn’t far from the fact that Alberta is four times more populated than Nova Scotia (at number eight in the second page). From this data, it simply means that when you are creating your dental clinic website, adverts targeting provinces like Alberta will be a more strategic option, because of the higher rate of interest there.

Also, the data from the map does not only show top sub-regions where the interest in the search topic is high but also shows you the time of the year when your search topic is at its peak in each sub-region. I recommend that you switch the time frame from 2004-present to the past 12 months so you can get a clearer picture of peak seasons.

3 Ways to Use "Google Trends" For Your New Dental Practice

  1. Using Google Trends for Keyword Research

Google trends can help you to figure out which keywords to go after, how to name your service categories, and how to optimize a blog post on the topic of Dental clinic. A little trick you can do to have an idea of what Google trending keywords to use is to take a quick look at “Related queries.” Still using Canada as our location setting, on the bottom right-hand corner of the graph, you can see about 22 related quarries pop up.

Throughout the 22 queries, the most callouts are to location and type of dental service. From the graphic above, there are two listings for an emergency. On other pages, you’ll find different locations within Canada, smile, walk-in clinics, family, etc. With this, you might choose to create a product category based on emergency services, location, smile augmentation, family or kids’ dental clinics, etc.

Additionally, you can also include the keywords from your search into your website page and likewise in the name of your dental service. “Dental care” or “dental hygiene” are other keywords that you could list as a product category since they have search volume and make sense for a dental practice.

  1. Monitor Competitors’ Positions with Google Trends Compare

Another way you can use Google Trends for your new dental practice is to monitor your competitors and see how well they’re performing against your practice. Using the “comparison +” feature, you can compare multiple search terms or competitors.

As your new practice gains a larger search audience, you can use the feature to ensure that your services are top-notch and ahead of competitors. Also, you can make use of the data to strategize on providing valuable content on your dental site. Your content must be informative and clear to your target audience. Website content that is ambiguous and hard to read will have the audience leaving your page in a matter of seconds to find another dental service site. For excellent content for your dental clinic website, you should consider using professional writing service reviews from websites such as Online Writers Rating.

Let’s take a look at a comparison of four toothpaste brands and see how they have been performing over the years: Colgate, Sensodyne, Crest, and Close-Up toothpaste.

What’s interesting here in the graph is the competition between Colgate and Crest at the top and Sensodyne and Close-up at the bottom. However, Crest has a more significant advantage.

Furthermore, a comparison might show that specific competitors are growing at a faster rate than your clinic. You can make use of the data to analyze their marketing channels and strategize on how to improve your practice. Besides using Google Trends to monitor your competitors’, you can also use it to know how popular your dental practice has become. The feature to track popularity is the Google Trends’ “News Headlines” feature. It allows you to monitor popularity alongside with all news stories.

Conclusion

Google Trends goes beyond your average SEO tool. There is so much insight you can get from using it’s amazing features, from providing you with the top industry trends, finding niche topics and content, right down to knowing who your competitors are, etc.

By applying the tips in this article, I hope Google Trends can help your new dental practice get the required boost it needs to stay ahead of the competition and grow.


About the Author

Frank Hamilton is a blogger and translator from Manchester. He is a professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, digital marketing and self-education. He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German and English.


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