Why You Should Use Google Trends to Evaluate Your Niche

It will help you decide if you’re in a growing market or not

Google Trends is your friend.

The ability to evaluate different niches and decide which one is worth focusing on is a critical skill all entrepreneurs have to learn.

Especially since the niche you choose will affect everything you do for a while, it’s worth doing some upfront research to verify that whatever path you choose shows promise.

I particularly like using Google Trends for evaluating different markets. You can input different keywords related to your niche (for example, the names of different technologies, like AWS or Kubernetes) to see how they are growing.

Had I discovered this sooner, I would’ve likely avoided months going down the wrong direction. 

How I Use Google Trends to Evaluate Niches

The first rule to choosing a niche is that it must be part of a growing market. And not only growing, but it has to grow faster than all of its competitors or other niches that you could focus on.

And that’s exactly what Google trends helps with, as the search volume trends can give you an indication of how fast or slow a niche is growing.

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About a month ago, I was trying to niche down in supply chain by focusing on implementing a particular software called Odoo.

However, after not being able to win many projects in this space, I decided to do more market research on Odoo. I found out that the data was there all along on why focusing on Odoo was not the right move for me.

At first glance on Google Trends, Odoo looks promising, as you can see it does appear to be trending upwards here.

By itself, Odoo looks like it’s a growing and promising market.

However, when I plotted it against one of its biggest competitors “Zoho”, I realized that Odoo was still relatively small and didn’t look like it was going to overtake them any time soon.

This suggests that if I was going to focus on any particular software, perhaps Zoho was better to focus on than Odoo.

Odoo’s growth looks small compared to Zoho

Then I decided to plot Zoho and Odoo against AI, and that’s when I realized that both of them were relatively small compared to AI.

AI’s growth makes both Zoho and Odoo look irrelevant.

And when I compared AI to other trends like crypto, I realized that AI is currently at double the peak of crypto in 2021! 

This graph indicates that both AI and crypto are both decent markets to niche down in.

The moment I saw these graphs was the moment I decided that Odoo was not the right niche for my consulting business, and decided to focus on AI instead.

This reminds me of a story from Jeff Bezos where, despite his extremely lucrative career in finance, he just couldn’t look past the fact that the internet was growing at 2400% year after year, which is why he left and founded Amazon.

Similarly, if AI is growing at the rate it is now, ignoring it could be a big mistake. And indeed, right after pivoting to it, I saw signals that it was the right move.

Final Thoughts

To be clear, Google Trends is only one factor to consider when niching down. If you were an Odoo expert, and you had a line of people out the door wanting your services, then by all means focus on Odoo.

But if all things were equal and you had to choose a niche, it’s probably better to bet your career on AI than on Odoo.

So the next time you do a pivot or positioning shift, I highly recommend using Google Trends to look at both the growth rates and relative interest compared to other niches to decide what to focus on.

And if you see a trend line like AI’s graph, it’s an indication to pay attention as there’s more opportunity there.

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Anyways, in the mean time, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter where I post daily content on AI.

And, if you have any referrals for folks interested in building anything related to AI, let me know!

I offer a 10% referral bonus (up to $1,000) for every opportunity that closes.

Thanks,

Michael