Google Trends for Business Plans

By Adam  |  26 Jun 2015 15:00:00

If you'd like to set up an eCommerce website to get a business going, a good thing to do is to mind-map all of the products which you believe you could happily sell. Think about what is practical for you, what you can obtain for a cheap price, what you know about, what fits well with your skill set. Every idea you get should be written down. Try to think of at least ten ideas.

Once you've got all your ideas mind-mapped, you should head over to Google Trends, which might just be able to give you an idea of which product would be the most marketable. Google Trends, for those who don't know, is a tool provided by Google which can show you how often things are searched for through Google search. So if, for example, you wanted to sell wooden carvings, you could write that into Google Trends and it would show you how often it 'Wooden Crafts' have been searched for recently and how often they'd been searched for in previous years. If the number of searches has been falling significantly every year, it might not be worth your time to start a business around wooden crafts, because those searches are likely to continue dropping. Having said that, if you do have an idea, and you find that Google Trends is against you, don't let it hold you back! Who knows? Maybe you could provoke a change in those trends.

All the information on Google Trends is given to you on a nice, easy to understand line graph. Google Trends also allows you to compare the statistics of several searches at once, that way it will be easy to see which of the products from your list of possibilities is most marketable. All of the statistics appear on the same graph together and each search simply has its own coloured line, so you get the past couple of years for all of them up together. If you're lucky, one of your options may have been slowly rising for the past few years, but only slowly, and your site can be a part of what helps it continue to grow in popularity.

Once you've decided which of your products is the most marketable, it could be well worth your time to have a quick search around to see what services are already available and to help yourself to identify any potential gaps in the market which you could fill. If everybody’s searching for something, for example, but when you search for it you find nowhere to buy anything, that’d be where you sweep in! Hopefully this post has been a good introduction to Google Trends and you will now be able to use it for the planning stages of your eCommerce site. 

When you have solidified your plans, you should open up your Sellr account! It's free and the perfect way to get new businesses on the right track.