Black or white? Coffee or tea? Egg or chicken? By listening, Google Trends solves perennial problems of humanity and answers unanswered questions.

Therefore, the tool can be used to satisfy the curiosity of Internet users or to create new philosophical questions, or finally to be used as a business or scientific tool. How can you use Google Trends to actually get what you need from the service to grow your business and advertise effectively online?

How does Google Trends work?

Every day, hundreds of millions of Internet users from all over the world enter various queries and phrases into the world's most popular search engine to get the information they need. Google Trends functionality is based on the presentation of results that interest users on certain topics. The application allows you to check whether a given phrase is popular anywhere in the world or only in a selected country or region. At the same time, the tool allows you to evaluate the interest of Internet users in certain keywords in terms of time. This allows you to evaluate whether the term you are analyzing has been gaining popularity lately, whether it has been at the forefront of the most frequently searched phrases for a long time, or whether it is just a temporary fad among Internet users.

Google trends - why is it worth it?

There are many reasons why you should use Google's free tool if you are a website developer, are active in the SEO/SEM industry, or are responsible for selling products or services online. Analyzing online trends allows you to develop an optimal strategy for promoting your brand or product online. At the same time, Google Trends is a great inspiration for people looking for interesting topics, for example, for a corporate blog. The ability to compare the popularity of individual queries will help you identify the most popular keywords to describe your business. In turn, time and geography analysis will be a valuable support in conducting content marketing and identifying target groups for your products.

Who is Google Trends for?

The simplest and only answer is: for everyone who deals with the widely understood promotion of brands, goods, and services online. If you are:

• owner of an online store,
• manager responsible for sales results,
• developer of a website or web applications,
• a start-up entrepreneur who is just entering the market with his or her own offer,
• Specialist in SEO or SEM,
• is a blogger looking for inspiration and interesting topics,
• a person responsible for analyzing the activities of competitors,

then Google Trends is for you. You can also use it when you're just curious about what people are typing into the search engine. Apart from providing measurable statistics and useful business information, learning about the program can also be very interesting. The tool allows you to check which events and people were the most popular among Internet users in a given year, as well as what users searched for most in the search engine.

How to use Google Trends?

In the central part of the website, there is a light blue box in which you should enter the word or query you are interested in, such as "women's shoes". After that, all you have to do is click on the magnifying glass icon and enjoy a wealth of information and statistics.

The first graph showing the popularity of the phrase over a certain period will be displayed to you. By default, this is the last 12 months, but you can change it by measuring the popularity of this query, for example, over 5 years, 90 days, or the last hour.

Google measures the popularity of individual words in points - from 0 to 100. As we can see in the example above, the phrase "women's shoes" was at its peak last year on March 17-23, 2020, reaching 100 points. In turn, the largest decrease in the popularity of the phrase (down to 33 points) was recorded in the third week of December 2020.

The next screen shows how the popularity of a phrase is distributed in the selected subregion or city.

The app also "offers" suggestions for the most popular topics related to the search phrase and other similar queries. Each of them has a percentage of popularity in a certain period. Google Trends allows you to download the report as a CSV file.

Check the popularity of queries

The above example illustrates how you can easily measure the potential of a particular query in terms of time and geography. From an Internet marketing, SEO, or e-commerce industry perspective, regular popularity analysis can provide many business benefits. Starting from information on whether a particular product or service is still popular among internet users, through the regions and cities where they are most often chosen, to suggestions of keywords to promote your offer.

Compare the relevance of requests

However, these are not all the reasons why you should use Google Trends. The app provides another very useful feature that compares the potential of individual queries. Let's say you run a business that buys used cars. You wonder if it will give you a better positioning effect on the phrase "buy a car" or "car repair". What do you do? You add both phrases to the comparison and check which one is more popular among Internet users.

As you can see, the phrase "buy a car" has been searched much more frequently over the past 5 years, so using it to describe your business - either on your website, Google My Business card, or in a sponsored link campaign - allows you to reach a relatively larger group of recipients.

How to use Google Trends in business?

Content marketing, just like website positioning and sponsored link campaigns, is largely based on the right keyword selection. However, Google Trends is a tool that goes far beyond comparing and evaluating the potential of individual phrases. The amount of information provided by the analysis of selected queries allows the application to help you grow your business and optimize sales. Below you will find some examples of how you can use Google Trends in your business.

How to use trends in Google Shopping?

The trend analysis tool will also be useful when you are planning to launch an advertising campaign. All you need to do is enter a phrase of interest in the window and set the search filter to Google Shopping. If interest in a particular product or service is systematically increasing, it's a sign that it might be worth investing in a new form of advertising.

Google Trends - the main advantages:

• checking the potential of individual keywords and queries,
• comparing the strength of specific phrases,
• evaluation of business ideas based on the analysis of product popularity,
• assessing the frequency of requests in terms of time and geography,
• Gaining knowledge about the seasonality of certain goods and services,
• suggested topics for blog posts,
• support for SEO, SEM activities and content marketing,
• free use of the program.

Summary

With the growing competition in the e-commerce industry, every tool that increases the effectiveness of an advertising campaign is worthy of attention. Google Trends is more than a free program for checking the popularity of keywords. It is a set of useful functionalities that will allow you not only to improve the quality of your content, but above all, to understand and feel what your potential customers are talking about and searching for. It's also a tangible support for your business, providing answers to key questions about demand, seasonality, and interest in certain products and services. If you want to respond quickly and efficiently to dynamic changes in user preferences, you must make sure to use them regularly.