See What Your Customers Search for with Google Trends
Knowing how your customers think and search matters
Google Trends is a free tool which Google offers to give webmasters and users an insight into the most popular topics on the web today. Here you can see the phrases your customers are searching for most.
About Google Trends
The home page of the Google Trends site offers an at-a-glance overview of the topics that are trending right now in your country, as well as historical charts and some in-depth charts about topics that Google thinks may interest you.
The home page is interesting from an academic point of view, but the thing that webmasters will be particularly interested in is the more detailed search feature. Simply enter the keyword that you are interested in and you will be presented with an impressive list of information about the frequency with which the keyword is searched in various regions, the popularity of the keyword over time and related keywords. There is another page that shows keywords which are currently “hot” in your area.
Why Google Trends Matters for Marketing
Google Trends is a valuable tool because it makes it easy to find out what people are interested in. If you are looking for ideas for blog posts and articles, want suggestions for link building or simply want to explore the long tail of keywords open to you at the moment, then Google Trends is a good starting point. Long-tail keywords tend to have less competition than shorter keywords, and they also tend to display stronger searcher intent. You can use this to your advantage to attract highly targeted traffic and improve your on-site SEO.
Google has made a lot of changes to the Trends platform over the years. In the past, they offered a Trends for Websites feature, but that feature was removed in September 2012. There are plans to offer an API to allow remote access to the Google Trends feature, but this has not yet been rolled out. Some unofficial APIs are available, but these are unsupported and are not recommended to be used in a production environment. Google could change how their Trends system works at any time, breaking these unofficial APIs.
Google Trends is a great market research tool, and it can help you to spot hot products and common issues and even get an insight into user preferences on both a local and a global scale. The trends are updated in real time and can provide an incredible launching point for more detailed keyword research using Moz tools or the Google AdSense keyword tool.
