Google Trends: Recognize topic potential and better read search interest
How Google Trends works, what it is useful for and where typical misinterpretations arise.
With Google topics, it rarely helps to know only buzzwords. It is important to understand the principles behind it and to derive concrete test and optimization steps from them.
How Google Trends works, what it is useful for and where typical misinterpretations arise. This wiki page arranges the topic practically and shows, When priority arises, which mistakes are often and how you derive concrete measures from them.
Example: A seasonal product reaches the index value 100
A trend curve for “Advent calendar” rises to 100 in November. This value denotes the relative peak of the selected evaluation, not 100 searches. Compare the same time period, region, and search type before evaluating two curves against each other.
For planning, the recurring seasonal pattern helps. It does not replace a sales forecast and an absolute search volume measurement. Also, check if you have selected a search word or a theme summarized by Google.
Basic Benefits of Google Trends
Using this tool, webmasters can analyze the popularity of individual keywords over a timeline. Therefore, the tool has its name: it allows conclusions to be drawn about the trends, which can be read from search entries of people worldwide. An example would be the increase in the input “Corona” since the beginning of 2020. The search for keywords about diseases has always shown important trends.
Google was already able to prove in the early 2000s with its tool Insights that and where a new flu wave is coming, because the users searched for the term and typical flu symptoms. Such searches correlate with the frequency of doctor visits, so the Google tool can actually predict flu and other disease waves.
Also correlations between the search for certain companies and their exchange transaction volumes can be proven with Google trends. Anyone who now runs a fashion business, for example, could use Google trends to determine which type of jeans might be in great demand again in the near future.
Google Trends: How it works
With the tool, Google offers the following functions:
- Compare search terms: Several search terms can be compared in real time and also in different languages. The simultaneous input of a maximum of five groups of terms with a maximum of 25 terms in each case is possible. Spelling errors, synonyms, spelling variants and plural or singular forms are not taken into account.
- Compare searches across languages: Those who do not use Latin characters for a search input will only receive data from those regions or countries where the characters in question apply. However, terms can be combined with signs of different languages, such as Latin with Cyrillic script (as well as any other fonts with each other). The user then puts in between the two terms in the different languages + and gets hits from all regions where one of the two languages is used. These hits compare Google trends with each other.
- Compare locations: A term can be entered, for example, for a product, to which the user then adds two or more different locations or regions. This allows him to see how the product is trending in the different regions.
- Compare periods: This function makes it possible to compare the searches for a particular term in different time periods. For example, the owner of the fashion store could compare when the jeans variant that is currently trending trended ten years ago or more (back to 2004). The comparison by period can be linked to the comparison by region. The fashion retailer could find that the jeans variant in question was a big hit in the USA in 2010 and is now in demand in Germany.
- Compare terms: The search for certain terms can be compared with the search for their synonyms, for example, or with the search for related queries. The search for synonyms could concern the terms “corona” and “novel virus”, the search for related requests would be, for example, the search for “corona” and “occupation of intensive beds”.
- Compare themes: These are overarching terms to which the related search queries also appear. One example is the search for a capital such as “Berlin”, to which the requests for “Capital of Germany” also appear. At the same time, those terms are listed that call an important name in other languages, such as for “London” also “Londres” (Spanish name for London).
Who uses Google trends?
The tool is worthwhile for search engine optimizers and also for the analysis of general trends that are interesting in the economy, society, medicine, etc. Scientists also appreciate Google’s tool and credit it with increasing accuracy.