Google Trends can be used to analyze interest in certain search terms. Google Trends helps us to determine the popularity of search terms over time and thereby highlight, for example, seasonality.
Google Trends also shows the most frequent search queries either for the current period or for specific regions or time intervals.
In the article below, I present the most important functions of Google Trends supported by some practical examples.
Tartalomjegyzék
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends shows the interest of Google search users in certain search terms. For example, how many people searched for "LED TV" between January 1, 2019 and May 1, 2019.
With the information obtained in this way, we find out which terms are trending and which terms show seasonality in terms of searches. Staying with the previous example, it is conceivable that the term "4K TV" is on the rise towards the end of December, but after December 24th, it declines, because the majority of TV purchases are dated to the Christmas period.
How do I access Google Trends?
Click here: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US
What features does Google Trends have?
The current trends and topics are displayed on the Google Trends homepage. We can follow the world's most popular search terms in real time and we can also see which ones are on the rise and which ones can only be linked to certain regions or events, e.g. Mother's Day or US elections.
For content marketing and SEO, the search function is the most exciting. In this section, Google gives us the opportunity to display quantities related to a certain search term. The display applies to the current state as well as the past, going back to 2004. The search volumes are not shown here as absolute values, but rather as relative values. He takes the highest value as 100, which shows the greatest interest. The other values on the chart are a relative value compared to the maximum.
In this section, we can tailor the diagram to our own needs. The filtering options are as follows:
- Region: here you can specify whether you are interested in international data or only a specific country
- Duration: in this section you can specify whether you want to see the values for the current or the previous hour or for a previous period
- Categories: for ambiguous terms, you can filter to certain areas.
- Web search: behind this tab, you can choose whether you want to display the graph of web searches or the graph of combined (Google News, Google Images, etc.) searches.
For SEO specialists and online marketers, Google Trends can not only display the data of a specific search term, but it can also compare the data of several similar terms.
How do I use Google Trends?
Creating the right content is important for an online business. You need to create content that meets the needs of your target audience, that is, you need content that is in high demand. And nothing indicates demand more precisely than the number of searches for the given term in a period.
- Click here and call the page. If you are interested in Hungarian trends, make sure that the country "Hungary" is selected in the upper right corner.
- In the "Enter a search term or a topic" search box, enter a term whose trend you want to display and hit Enter. On the screen that appears, you can see the search trend diagram for the given term from the last 1 year.
- You can add another term to the upper right "Compare" section, so you can compare several trends.
- On the filter line, you can refine your search by country, period, categories and search type.
- You can download or share the data using the icons in the upper right corner of the diagram.
In the example below, you can see how popular the term "4K TV" is during the Christmas period. Also, you can see that the search term "8K TV" is slowly growing against it, but it's still significantly behind it. It is expected that the period will come when the term "8K TV" will be more popular than "4K TV" and in this case the retailer will have to adapt their content marketing to the already changed needs.
In the example below, you can still see the data of the last 5 years, staying with the term "4K TV". Here, the rise of the Christmas season and the rise in popularity of this type of TV set are clearly outlined.
Why is Google Trends important in SEO and online marketing?
From the point of view of online marketing and SEO, it is recommended to determine search interests and seasonality using Google Trends before starting content writing. Google Trends not only shows how much interest there is in the given term right now and how much it has been in recent months, but it can also outline long-term trends. In addition, it can help us to find out which of several relevant terms seem to be the strongest and which ones are searched for more.
