Google trends offers a glimpse into what the world is searching for and talking about right now. One of my clients complained that it was another hoop to jump through, but I see it more like a playbook to the game of Google search results. With a few minutes of your time, you can see if your writing includes potential words or phrases that clients might be using to find your web site. This will help organic SEO results and pay per click advertising.
Hot Searches
Hot Searches is Google's snapshot of what people are currently searching. If current events are relevant to your business and non-controversial, piggyback on that popularity. This is called newsjacking. Just remember to stay away from hot topic issues or you'll find yourself on a list like this.
Explore
To me, this area is the more powerful tool. Here you can figure out what words and phrases your customers and readers are actually typing. Use it when writing and editing content, especially in meta tag abstracts, to find the most search friendly terms.
Starting at the top, customize your search terms based on location, time frame, categories, and type of search. For this example, I started with the defaults.
Interest over time
The first section simply shows a search term and the interest across a ten year span. Let's look at a search I did recently for a catering client that does a lot of work during the winter holiday season. I started with the client preferred phrase, "holiday party" and got these results.
As you can see, the chart unsurprisingly peaks near the end of each year and happens annually.
The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don't represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. Each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. When we don't have enough data, 0 is shown.
Regional interest
In addition to showing users preference to a phrase over time, this section offers global insight into search terms. This is especially relevant to ensure you're using the phrases that appeal to your audience. Here we see that when you look by city the phrase "Christmas party"…
… is not what San Francisco prefers, instead it is "holiday party".
Related Searches
Here there is excellent potential to find great, relevant search terms to promote your web site. Top and Rising both lead you to most searched for words and phrases.
Pay special attention to trends based on the regions your company or blog targets. And then there's Google's crystal ball!
Forecasts
Well of course, not really. They collect and organize data - personal, web traffic, web site content - so it's worth a look. All terms don't have forecasts, but the goal is:
To predict the popularity of a term in the future, Trends looks at how many people searched for that term in the past. Trends doesn’t take into account the context of the search term or its category.
This post edited by the Revise It! Team.