Short Desc: Free tool from Google that allows you to see general search trends at various time frames.

URL: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US

Description

The most common uses of Google Trends data will be during Marketing Assessment and working on SEO Research when building out your SEO content optimization strategy.

Features and Benefits

Google Trends allows you to take a quick graphical fluctuation at Google Search Trends at various time periods with the shortest time period being 1-hour and the longest time period being 2004-present.

For Marketing Assessment and SEO Research purposes, the most common trends you will be researching are 1-year and 5-year trends

1. The 1-year trend will give insight on seasonal ups and downs when it comes to search volume, demand and business
2. The 5-year trend will give insight on whether searches for selected keyword(s) are moving up or down in general and whether things beyond seasonal trends need to be taken into consideration
3. The common thread in using both of these as a tandem as they are important in establishing good communication with clients when it comes to managing expectations.

For example, in the below screenshot for "Google Ads" and "Google AdWords", the 12-month screenshot shows volume is mostly steady throughout the last year except for a substantial surge during the holiday season.

While the 1-year graph tells a story, it does not tell the entire story. Below is the graph from the exact same keywords the only change being taking a look at the 5-year trend. From this what you can see is that "Google Ads" search volume has moved up while "Google AdWords" has trended down substantially - not surprising as Google did a rebrand from "Google AdWords" to "Google Ads" that is consistent with the below trend.

A couple other things to keep in account if you see skewed data:

1. If you put in a few keywords (5 is the limit, typically 2-4 will be utilized at a time), and one of those keywords has a substantially higher volume than the others, you will see the trend for that keyword but not the others, even if the latter keywords have decent amount of volume - in that case break up your research into two different trends searches
2. If a keyword, product, service, that you put in went viral during the time period covered, this will heavily skew data not only in overall search volume reported however what you will see is a huge spike at the applicable point with the graph showing an indecipherable trend in the before and after time period

Instructions

1. Go to https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US
2. Type in the search terms you are researching, separated by commas (maximum of 5 keywords) and then hit enter

3. Google Trends will default to the 12-month view, to shift to the 5-year view, click the dropdown next to where it says "Past 12 Months"

    

4. Select "Past 5 Years"

Open Questions

Unresolved questions you are still working through and need feedback on.

References

• Review Google Analytics Data