Track brand search patterns and identify media placements that drive growth using Google Trends to gain a competitive edge.
Have you ever read something in the press or on a media site and then searched Google to learn more about the topic? Almost everyone has. After reading an article about a product or idea, many people use a search engine to find deeper details about the topic or its elements. This workflow can drive short- or long-term brand or non-brand keyword search patterns.
By analysing these patterns, you can answer very strategic digital marketing, PR, and SEO questions:
✓ What types of media placements drove these search patterns?
✓ What product messaging and positioning is driving audience interest?
✓ Should we consistently invest in PR or SEO instead of short-term campaigns?
✓ How do I steal my competitor’s best placements with our unique positioning?
✓ What publications should I use to test product positioning for a new go-to-market strategy?
✓ How do I increase the brand search for a new product launch?
These questions just scratch the surface of ways to apply this analysis to strategic search marketing, new category design, or general product management.
What is Brand Search Behaviour?
Brand search behaviour refers to how an audience searches for brand details as a result of either short-term or long-term engagement with brand messaging across other platforms. This behaviour is a strong indicator of brand engagement. As the audience learns about your brand or aspects of it, they will naturally search Google for more details.
Brand search behaviour can work like this:
1. Problem awareness: Search begins after the audience identifies a need, issue, or potential solution from the press, social, or advertisements, often using non-branded keywords to learn more (e.g., “best fitness tracker”).
2. Brand-specific search: After researching or learning about potential solutions, the audience may search for specific brands using branded keywords (e.g., “Fitbit” or “Fitbit data”).
3. Deeper search for validation: Consumers compare brands and seek detailed information using keywords like “vs.” or “reviews” to evaluate options.
4. Purchase decision: The audience might use search terms focused on finding the best price, how to buy, or maybe contact (e.g., “buy Apple Watch” or “Apple Watch price”).
5. Post-purchase search: After buying, consumers may search for support, tips, or community engagement (e.g., “Fitbit phone”).
This process provides deep insight into what drove this brand search behaviour.
Analysis Process Overview
This process identifies the messaging, sources, and people driving an audience to search for a brand. I use this tool stack to analyse: Google Trends, Glimpse, Ahrefs, and Grok on the X platform. The steps are fairly simple:
1. Select competitor phrasing: This is how people search for a competitor or your brand name.
2. Uncover search patterns: Find short-term or long-term patterns for growth in brand search patterns.
3. Find the source of influence: Identify leading indicators of those patterns. What is driving brand search?
Starting by identifying the phrasing used to search the competitor (e.g., brand name) ensures you’re finding the right keyword phrases that an audience uses to find the brand website. The leading indicators, or the source of influence, can identify patterns for:
• Growth
• Decline
• Random changes
An audience can search for a brand name after just reading one or a few strategic placements or after constant exposure to a brand’s messaging.
Example: Lectric eBike
I’ll use Lectric eBike as an example to show how this process works. They are an eBike brand that has gone from 37,000 to over 210,000 organic clicks per month, with over 150,000 clicks per month from brand searches. Their brand search has grown in both the short- and long-term over the past few years.
1. Select competitor and phrasing: Use Semrush to identify the top variations of brand keywords. Go to Project > Overview > Organic research > Positions. Select the top variation or run reports for all variations of the brand or product names. In this example, the most popular brand variation is “Lectric eBike,” but people also use “lectric.” In this case, we see that search terms get an estimated 33.1K searches per month. But people also search for one of the eBikeproduct lines, like the “lectric XP 3.0.” These terms are a starting point for how the brand drives these searches. Use these keywords to search for patterns in Google Trends.
2. Identify patterns with Google Trends: Before starting your search, use the Glimpse plugin (for Chrome) to update the Google Trends UI and add some very useful features. This tool adds a trendline that shows seasonality or year-over-year (YoY) trends in an easy-to-understand format. This has saved me much time in exporting and analysing the data. Identify growth patterns (e.g., spikes or upward trends) like seasonality, year-over-year growth, or random spikes. The random spikes are my favourite because they can show short-term impact as a result of a specific event. Then, export the data to be analysed later.
In this case, the growth in brand search interest started in the summer of 2022 but grew substantially in 2024.
Leading indicator questions:
✓ What causes the initial growth in the summer of 2022?
✓ What media coverage caused YoY growth in brand search in 2024 from 2023 and 2022?
Tip: Consistent media coverage can show YoY growth, especially during peak buying seasons. When analysing growth, look at media coverage from the past 12 months, not just the month when the growth occurred.
Finding leading indicators can be challenging. Sometimes, a few media mentions can lead to a significant spike in interest. At other times, ongoing marketing efforts over several months or years may result in gradual YoY growth.
3. Identify the source of influence: Use the tool stack to identify the source that influenced the growth patterns. This doesn’t typically include analysis of YouTube videos, Instagram/TikTok, or forums like Reddit, but it will provide fast insights into the messaging and trusted media sources.
For each pattern you want to understand, identify potential leading indicators. Here’s the process:
• Grok for Twitter search: Ask Grok for media coverage of the brand name. Use this to identify potential trends in messaging or product launches.
• Ahrefs brand mentions: Run reports in Content Explorer to identify brand mentions over time. I haven’t found a better tool to do this process.
• ChatGPT analysis: Analyse all three Ahrefs reports to identify brand mentions to analyse.
Search X with Grok
Grok has real-time access to X’s content, so you can get recent information about X’s content and have Grok summarise the findings. You can be creative with the prompts, but I like to ask for a summary of brand mentions.
When Grok summarised mentions of “Lectric eBikes” on X, it provided additional details that would require extensive research. Grok quickly shows the new product launch coverage. The messaging of “quality at a low price” is consistent with the brand.
Grok has some insights, but I use Ahrefs to analyse the media coverage more deeply and validate Grok’s output.
Ahrefs brand mentions
Use the Content Explorer report in Ahrefs to identify historical trends in coverage of the brand on press, blogs, and some message boards. Export the full list of publications to be uploaded to ChatGPT for analysis.
In this analysis, the Ahrefs bar chart illustrates the media story. Mentions in 2021 were more consistent, while late 2022 saw a focus on holiday promotions. Both trends deserve further analysis.
Tip: Test using phrase (use ” ” for phrase) or exact (use [ ] for exact) match Boolean queries to find more precise mentions. With “lectric,” Ahrefs returned a lot of mentions for “electric,” which was not a relevant brand mention.
Analysing this data manually can be very laborious, so I use ChatGPT to take much of the work out of the analysis and find specific insights.
ChatGPT analysis
Upload the Google Trends and Content Explorer exports to ChatGPT to analyse patterns in the brand mentions and brand search trends. For this example, I quickly identified some key insights from correlation in Google Trends and brand mentions from Content Explorer.
From ChatGPT analysis, I found that the brand focused on some high-authority (e.g., Forbes) and also vertically targeted publications (e.g., Electrek). Their consistent messaging about low cost and high quality is appealing to the audience of these publications.
I found these outputs from ChatGPT useful for understanding the media impact on patterns or identifying media to analyse further.
Get key insights into leading indicators of random patterns/spikes or long-term trends.
• Find general trends in media types that correlate with spikes or trends.
• Identify what specific sites could have driven spikes.
A big limitation is that this model doesn’t include larger market trends that can influence. However, you can use Google Trends to help identify those as well.
Bonus: Consider PEST Analysis
You may want to use the PEST (political, economic, social, technological) model to identify major market factors that could contribute to these growth patterns. I know this doesn’t include competition, but it could fall under each of these categories. The greater societal trends can have a big impact on demand for certain products or services.