What is Google Trends and how can you use to your advantage?

What are Poles looking for (and what are the French, Italians, Vietnamese, Israelis…)?

Google, one of the world’s largest companies and creators of the most popular internet search engine in the world, offers a truly wide range of available services. Everyone – or most – has an email, has used maps or a translator, but how many people are regular users of Google Search Console or Google Analytics?

These are extensive tools without which many fields – such as website development and content marketing – could not develop to the level they are at today. Without efficient information retrieval services, there would be no professions such as content writing and broadly understood search engine optimization. It can even be said that our knowledge of the topic depends on our level of initiation in providing services in the virtual space. If we are not related to the topic or work in one of the industries mentioned above, such data may only interest us as a hobby.

Today we will talk about a website that can be another support for people involved in SEO and website content management. We are talking about Google Trends, a database accumulating search trends and trends for a given country..

What does Google Trends contain?

“Find out what Internet users from all over the world are looking for,” says the inscription on the Trends home page.

We can enter a word or topic into the search engine, and the program will show us the interest – reflected in a given time period – using a chart with the search trend marked. The chart is interactive – when you hover over the line, you will find out how many times a given term was searched for in a specific period.

Regions

The X-axis shows time – its range can be set even to a point as distant in time as 2004; we can also specify the dates according to our own preferences. The Y axis, in turn, is the popularity of the slogan – the scale ranges from 100 to 0; the former value means the peak moment of interest in the issue, the latter means that the term was searched so rarely that there is insufficient data for visualization. Such a chart is prepared for each country from which Google has data. Of course, Poland is also among them. We can even check interest for each region of the country.

Subject

These include, among others, “science”, “finance”, “people and society”, “work and education”, etc. – a total of 25 fields, and each of them is also divided into more precise categories. For example, “hobbies and leisure” contains another 17 subcategories, including “clubs and nightlife”, “recreational aviation” and “crafts”. Therefore, even if we do not want to track search trends for a specific term, we are still able to precisely narrow down the results using the filters offered by the application.

Let’s add to this the ability to specify whether we are looking for image, news or YouTube search results and the ability to compare two categories, and we will fully see what a comprehensive source of information Google Trends is.

Top searches

Available in a separate tab within the application, this option allows you to view the current search trend for a given region – also taking into account certain filters. The “Daily” section shows the results that have seen a significant increase over the last twenty-four hours compared to all results. The “Real-time” tab shows the most popular topics from the last 24 hours, along with a chart showing the trend. After clicking, more details appear – a curve showing interest and bars representing the amount of materials published on a given topic on a specific day.

This allows you to precisely track the development of interest in a given topic and the relationship between the amount of content and the increase or decrease in searches over time.

What to use Google Trends for?

The main stakeholders will be people involved in marketing or content management. Of course, dry data will not guarantee us success – the key to it is understanding, analyzing and skillful use.

If we are going to offer a seasonal service, we can check when interest in a similar topic begins to increase.

Another obvious issue is the ability to check the condition of keywords – which are doing better than others, which are losing popularity, and which – if they are not yet very popular but are showing an upward trend – may soon be searched for frequently. As the program also offers checking related search results, it offers us a large pool of potential keywords for which we can later position our websites.

Additionally, by tracking our own phrases, we can check their search trends – which will help us better manage the content of our website. We will be able to make a decision about expanding the words, transforming specific subpages into e.g. evergreen content (if the trend returns regularly) or combining two articles that contain similar phrases and which are not searched for very often separately.

However, remember that the application only provides data. The key is to properly “process” them – that is, to understand where they come from, what they depend on and what they can actually be useful for. This requires considerable analytical skills – but it is worth remembering that such an extensive collection is available to virtually everyone. It is certainly worth monitoring the popularity of our website from time to time, and if we want to engage in marketing in the future, the ability to work with such programs is mandatory.