Using Google Trends to Research your Brand

by Simon Heseltine - RedBoots Consulting

You may think you know everything there is to know about your brand, but what if you don't? What if there's another company or product out there with the same name? What if there is a company with a product that has the same name? If you have a trademark on your name, you'll most likely want to take steps to remedy this. If not, you may want to find out who may take steps against you.

The easiest way to find out about your brand competition is to simply do a search for your brand in a search engine like Google. This will show you who ranks for your name, but it doesn't show you the geographical volume and distribution of those searches (which can indicate who the searches are actually for). Luckily Google has a tool out there for you to do just this: Google Trends.

For example, one of the clients at my company had what seemed to me to be a non-unique name and I wanted to find out the level of brand competition they faced. This particular company is a player in a medical niche industry and is based in the US, although they do sell their products to a global audience. Searching on Google showed me that they displayed in the first 2 organic positions for their brand. What would Google Trends tell me about the actual searches for their brand?

Slovenia? Belgium? Brazil? Ok, time to search on their brand name and those country names to see if those really are searches for my client, or for someone else. Slovenia turned out to be a fairly successful European health products manufacturer. Belgium turned out to be a medical machine manufacturer. Brazil turned out to be a medical supply manufacturer. None of these companies were affiliated with my client. Outside the US, there's obviously a great deal of potential for brand confusion, but what about in the US?

Well, something looks a bit curious about Washington State and the Boston area. Time to do some more Google searches with regional modifiers. Sure enough, that brand is used by the medical division of an educational institute in Washington. It is also a product line offered by a medical company exclusively in the Boston area. Once again, the potential for brand confusion exists.

So outside of the trademark issue, how useful is this information? Consider this. If the company were doing PPC and their conversion rate on branded terms were below the expected average, it could be because there is brand confusion. In that case it would behoove them to ensure that in the areas where there is this potential for brand confusion, (Washington and Boston) their ad copy differentiates their company from the local brand competitor. Of course examination of their analytics would determine whether brand confusion is really the culprit of the low conversion rate. (i.e. seeing that there is an inordinate number of visitors from Slovenia.)

Remember that brand confusion doesn't just come about by having companies or products with the exact same names. Just being similar enough can be an issue, as the people at iToons and UTube have found out over the past few years.

Simon Heseltine is the Director of Search at RedBoots Consulting and the organizer of the Virginia Search Engine Marketing Meetup group.

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.