» How Does Google Trends Stack Up?

Find hot new trends to create products or services in. That’s the latest from Google with their launch of Google Trends, a unique, new trend searching tool. Here’s a little about how it works…

When you type in a word (or words) Google Trends reports back with a chart that shows how often the keywords or keyphrases are searched for over time. You may see some sharp spikes or a flat plateau depending on the “trend factor” of your search.

Obviously, a keyword that is searched for steadily over time will show a plateau, whereas a keyword related to a passing topic (like tax extensions) will show a sharp spike about the time of its peak (probably right after the tax deadline in April here in the U.S.).

One interesting point to make is that under the graph, Google Trends will show the top 10 cities that searched for the term. Very useful if you’re going to pursue offline marketing techniques.

It will also display the top few regions (i.e., U.S., India, Canada, United Kingdom) and the top languages.

Off to the right of the screen, you will see a few links to news articles pertaining to your topic. They have letters by them that correspond to the peaks on the graph. So you can see how the news relates to the searches.

So how can you use this information?

Well for starters, if you have a news site (or one in a niche market where you like to think you’re an authority), you can quickly find out whether or not people are searching on a particular keyword. You can also find some relevant news articles to write about on the topic. Just quickly summarize the news and supply your readers with a link to the full article.

One nice feature about Google Trends is that you can compare keywords and phrases. Just type in a few related words (separated by comma) and you will see a graph that shows both terms pitted against each other. That way you can see relationships. This feature is unique (that I know of) to Google Trends.

To show you the power of this new tool, you can type in “blogging, podcasting”. The graph supplied shows how people are searching for both terms almost equally.

Since podcasting and blogger are intertwined, you would think one would follow the other in popularity, and it seems that they have. When one peaks, so does the other.

This is excellent market research for you if you are in the blogging market. You know without a doubt that your bloggers will be interested in the latest news in podcasting. You can even see the major news stories that correspond with the peaks and provide your bloggers with similar information.

You may try Google Trends out for yourself here…

http://www.google.com/trends

I don’t believe this free tool will replace the popular keyword research tools (like Wordtracker), nor is it meant to. For one, Google Trends does not list how many searches there are for any given keyword … all you see are the peaks, plateaus, and valleys. For another, it doesn’t return any related results. All this is fine, Google Trends is a great resource in its own right.

But if you want to research keywords and phrases for building a website around (and SEO), you will still want to use a tool like Wordtracker.

Technorati Tags: Wordtracker, Google Trends