The digital world evolves every second, so how do we know what's trending at any particular moment? Introducing Google Trends, a handy tool for content creators and digital marketing agencies that helps analyse what the consumers are searching for on the internet. Today we will guide you through the basics of Google Trends and how it can benefit your content writing game.
What Is Google Trends?
I'm sure everyone in the world knows Google, the most popular search engine with more than 40,000 searches per second, which makes up to 3.5 billion searches per day! With such high usage, Google manages to collect behavioural search data from billions of users globally to improve user experience and cater to the best search results for each intent.
Google Trends is an online tool that helps users visualise and discover trends in people's search behaviour within Google Search, Google News, Google Images, Google Shopping and YouTube, developed by Google to let everyone access the data at any time they like. The vast amount of searches trillions take place every year make Google Trends one of the world's largest real-time datasets.
How To Use Google Trends?
Google Trends works more or less like an ordinary Search Engine. Type in keywords the way you do on Google on Google Trends, and it will show statistical data of those particular search queries in detail.
The results will show the popularity graph for each keyword. You can also sort by region, time, industry, website link, video, or news posts. Also, you can compare the keyword with another as well.
If you scroll down, you will see a map. This map shows the popularity of the keyword in each province or state of the specified country. It also suggests related keywords if you would like to conduct basic keyword research as well, how convenient!
What’s the Use of Google Trends?
The data explicit in Google Trends was compiled from the behaviour of billions of users around the globe, not from a poll that could be framed. No matter what the topic is, searches on Google will be recorded.
One thing you can tell about Thai people's behaviour from looking through Google Trends data is the search for "lottery". Lottery in Thailand is announced every 1st and 16th day of each month. If you type this in Google Trends, the graph will appear to gain popularity on those exact days.
Alternatively, you can use Google Trends to compare relativity between keywords. We can use it to plot graphs with multiple keywords into one. Let's say we want to see the correlation between "US election" and "Trump", from the figure we can see that these two search queries tended to rise and fall at the same time. But remember, correlation is not necessarily causation, so be on the lookout.
These are just some examples of what you can do with Google Trends. You can utilize the data in many other fields, such as social media content writing, Search Engine Marketing, or SEO Keyword Research to write blog posts on your company website. With relevant data, your content will gain more credibility.
Year in Search: What Was Trending 10 Years Ago?
Users can throw back to the trending topics of each year. The Year In Search Google Trends shows the search data from more than ten years back. At the moment, the data reached the year 2022, and you can select which country you'd like to inspect.
Year In Search 2022 showed us quite an interesting year we all went through. And Wordle was Google's most popular search in 2022.
Hot Trends: Trending Search Queries in Real-time
Another interesting feature of Google Trends is the Hot Trends section that allows us to see the trending search queries in real-time. Google Hot Trends is an addition to Google Trends which displays up to the top 25 hot searches, i.e., fastest-rising, searches (search-terms) of the past hour in various countries. Hot Trends can be accessed via the web page or you can set it as a screensaver as well!
If anyone of you has seen Google's offices, they exhibit this feature on big LED screens everywhere. This is a nice idea as the employees can track online events simultaneously.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is search interest?
This means that when we look at search interest over time for a topic, we're looking at that interest as a proportion of all searches on all topics on Google at that time and location.
What is the Search Volume Index?
The graph that appears after you have looked up a certain topic or query does NOT represent the actual search volume numbers, but rather an index ranging from 0-100.
What is the popularity of a term?
We index our data to 100, where 100 is the maximum search interest for the time and location selected. A value of 100 is the peak popularity of the term, whilst a value of 50 means that the term is half as popular.
How can I monitor my marketing performance with it?
Google Trends tool can help you discover how much activity or interest is being shown towards your product or brand at a certain period of time.
What is the quota limit for Trends searches?
Google has incorporated quota limits for Trends searches, but details of quota limits have not yet been provided. This limits the number of search attempts available per user/IP/device.
How often does Google update its Trends?
Google now claims to be "updating the information provided by Google Trends daily; Hot Trends is updated hourly." On August 6, 2008, Google launched a free service called Insights for Search.
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