How To Discover Your Own Niche in Video Game Journalism Part 3: Google Trends

I’ve covered how to find your own niche in video game journalism. Today, I’m going to cover another tool in helping you with that first step of finding your topic. If you haven’t read the previous two guides, you can check out part one and part two before reading this for a better understanding.

With this guide I will be covering how to choose a topic using Google Trends. Basically, every thing written here will also be covered in the video at the top so feel free to just watch the video if you want.

Getting Started

Say you have a few topics that you enjoy talking about. With Google Trends, you can see which ones are being searched for and which ones aren’t. If the topic you choose is being searched for, you have a better chance of pulling in views. So for me, I really like to write about Final Fantasy XIV; when I go to Google Trends, I’ll put in the term Final Fantasy XIV.

As you can see since 1.0, Final Fantasy XIV search traffic has been pretty sporadic. Now let’s see what happens when I abbreviate the title, because if you’re like me, you hate typing out Final Fantasy XIV all the time.

That’s a pretty significant difference in traffic, so if you were going to write about Final Fantasy XIV you would want to put FFXIV in the title. You would also put in FFXIV in your tags as well.

Comparing Topics

Say Final Fantasy XIV is not your thing. That’s okay, because you can use it as a reference for other subjects. For instance, Grand Theft Auto V. A lot of people are in to that game, so let’s use the FFXIV data as a reference for Grand Theft Auto V.

Here is the result. It looks like FFXIV gets more traffic than Grand Theft Auto V based on this. However, let’s put in GTA V and compare it like we did with FFXIV for Final Fantasy XIV.

As you can see, GTA V completely blows FFXIV away as far as traffic goes. So if GTA V is your thing, then that would be a good topic for your niche.  This method of comparison will work with practically any topic so just play around with a few topics. Try to use a known as your reference line so that you can see a decent perspective for your topic.

I hope you found this guide useful, leave a comment below if you have any questions, comments, or concerns or concerns. If there are any other tips and tricks you would like me to write about as well, let me know.