Google has created a new, centralized hub of its various business resources and guides designed to help brands maximize their use of Google’s tools for marketing and outreach amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

As explained by Google:

“It’s important to understand the potential impact of changes in consumer behavior on your business. As you evolve your short and long-term digital marketing strategies, we want to be there to help. That’s why we’ve created a single destination for product guidance and business considerations for managing your campaigns through COVID-19.”

As you can see above, the listing isn’t elaborate in its presentation, but it includes a range of overviews and helpful hints for businesses – both in general, and within a selection of specific verticals.

So how do the impacts of COVID-19 on search, for example, relate to your branding efforts?

As explained by Google, while it’s already created a new Retail Trends tool to uncover emerging products of interest as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns, businesses should also consider using Google Trends to check out how changes in user behavior could be impacting their target segments.

The various tips and notes can help provide some guidance as to where you should be looking, and they may well uncover some elements that you hadn’t considered, so they’re definitely worth a look.

In addition to this, Google has also outlined some COVID-19 search data trends of note, including:

• Americans are watching videos related to recipes and cooking at a rate 31% higher than they did the same time last year.
• People are turning to online video for help in coping with anxiety and stress. So far in the U.S. this year, views of meditation-related videos are 51% higher than the same period in 2019.
• According to internal data, searches for “food delivery services” have grown globally by more than 300% year over year.

Largely much as you would expect, but still interesting to note the rate of those increases over time.

Google also notes that Google Meet, which it recently made available for free to all Gmail users, is now hosting “3 billion minutes of video meetings, and adding nearly 3 million new users everyday”. Google made Meet available to stem rising competition from video conferencing app Zoom, and with added promotion within Gmail, its efforts look to be having an impact.

You can check out Google’s new COVID-19 business information hub here.