What is Google Trends and how to use it?

What are the Americans looking for (what about French, Italians, Vietnamese, Israelis…)?

Google, that is the enormous company worldwide and the most popular creator that provides the most popular Internet search engine, offers a wide range of services available. Everyone, or most of us, has an email, has ever used Google Maps or translator. How many people, however, are the regular users either of Google Search Console or Google Analytics?

These two are powerful tools without which many fields – website development and content marketing – could not progress to the level they are at now. With no efficient information search services, there would be no professions and cooperation settled with content writing. Broadly understood search engine optimization would not have even existed. It may be said that our knowledge of the given subject vary on our initiation into the provision of services in the virtual reality. If we are interested in a specific topic and do not work in industries listed above, such data may catch our attention and become a hobby.

Today we will tell you about a website that is a support for people related to SEO and content managers. It is Google Trends, that is a database which accumulate search trends for a given country.

What does Google Trends contain?

„Explore what the world is searching” says the inscription on the Trends homepage.

We can type a word or a sentence and the search engine will show us its interest – reflected on a basis of a given time period – using a graph where the search trend is marked. It is an interactive graph – after you click on the line you will find out how many times a query given has been searched.

Regions

The X axis displays a period of time – its scope can be determined even for a distant point like 2004. We can choose the dates according to our preferences too. In return, the popularity of the slogan is shown by the Y axis – the scale ranges from 100 to 0; the former value signifies the peak moment of interest, while the latter signifies that the term was searched so rarely that there is no data to show. Such a chart is prepared for every country from which Google have gained data. Of course, USA is there too. We can even check interest for each region or state.

Subject

„Science” and „Finance” are among them – it is 25 field overall, and every one is divided into precise categories. For example „Hobbies & Leisure” includes another 17 sub-categories (e.g. „Clubs & Nightlife”, „Recreational Aviation” and „Crafts”). Therefore, even if we do not wish to follow and stay tuned with search trends on a given term, we are still able to narrow down the results precisely using the filters that application provides us with.

We have to mention the possibility of specification whether the image, news or YouTube search results are our interest. We can compare two categories too, so as to see what a comprehensive source of information Google Trends is.

The most popular searches

It can be seen in a separate tab of the application. This option allows you to view the current search trend for a given region, even if we take certain filters into account. The daily section shows the results that have significantly increased over the last twenty-four hours compared to the rest. The tab that refers to the so-called real time presents the most popular topics from the last 24 hours, along with a trend graph. Click to find out more about details – a curve shows interest and bars which represent the materials published on a given topic on a specific day.

This solution let us trace the development of our interest from a specific branch of industry, and the relation between the content volume and the increase or decrease in searches over time.

What to use Google Trends for?

Google Trends are used mostly by people involved in marketing or content management. Of course, data do not guarantee success at all. Comprehension, analysis and skills are the keys.

If we are about to offer a seasonal services, should we check the interest and realise when it increases.

Quite an obvious consideration is the ability to check the state of some keywords, that is which are better than others that are losing popularity, and what keywords are about to be searched frequently in the nearest future (if those have not been popular yet but they are trending upwards). The program let us check related search results too, and it offers a large pool of potential keywords to us (for which we can position our websites).

In addition, thanks to the ability to track our own phrases, we might verify what are the search trends nowadays. This will help us manage the content published on our website. We will be able to make a decision in case of expanding the sentences too, adding more keywords, transforming the subpages into so-called evergreen content (if the specific trends returns regularly) or combining two articles that contain similar phrases and that have not been searched separately.

However, Google Trends provides data only. The proper „processing” is the key, which is the understanding where do they come from, what they depend on and what can those be useful for. It requires considerable analytical skills. It is worth bearing in mind that such enormous collection remains available to everyone online. It is worth verifying the popularity of our websites from time to time, and whether we plan to deal with marketing – the ability to work using such programs becomes mandatory.