Get started with Google Trends

Google Trends can help you better understand how people find information on Google Search, which can help you to develop your content strategy and refine how you talk to your audience.

Google Trends provides a random sample of aggregated, anonymized, and categorized Google and YouTube searches. It lets you analyze interest in a particular query or topic from around the globe or at city-level geography. If you're interested in learning more about what's available, check the FAQ about Google Trends data.

Google Trends has two main tools for you to pull and analyze data:

  • If you're interested in exploring custom terms and topics, checking their regional interest, and related topics over time, use the Explore tool.
  • If you're interested in understanding what's trending now on Google, including an approximate Search volume, trending timeline, and related News articles, use the Trending now tool.

To learn more about how to navigate these tools, watch the Google Trends walkthrough and the other videos in the Google Trends Tutorials series.

You can use the Trending Now page to monitor what's been trending recently, and the Explore page to check what are the rising or top terms and topics for different locations, date ranges, categories, and Google properties.

If you know a search term or topic is rising, consider if it applies to your industry and your target audience. Think about how you can discuss a topic and bring value about the topic in a way that resonates with your audience; take a look at the content that's already out there and consider if writing about this topic on your site would be useful to your audience. For example, if you manage a clothing department store, you could check when new brands are starting to rise; if you cover sports for a news company, you can check when important athletes are in the media; or if you sell computers, you can check which models are getting more popular.

There are two main approaches to monitoring rising trends, depending on whether you're looking at general changes in search interest, or changes that are specific to your site.

Here are two ways of looking for general trends:

  • Use the Explore tool and leave the search box empty. This shows you the top terms and topics trending. You can apply the country, date, category, and property filters to focus your analysis.
  • Use the Trending now tool to find rising trending terms, apply filters to narrow down to terms that might be interesting to you, and find related news articles and terms to get more context about a trend.

To explore trends specific to your website, compile a list of terms you're already interested in and search for them using the Explore tool. For example, if you have a cheese store, you could check what types of cheese people are searching for to make sure you're offering them in your store. Here's an example of how a chart may look like for Brie, Cheddar, Provolone, Parmesan, and Mozzarella.

Interest over time for Brie, Cheddar, Provolone, Parmesan and Mozzarella on Google Search web results

In this example, the topics include data that's related to each type of cheese, not just the search terms. Topics aggregate across languages and include misspellings, variations, and acronyms related to it. This can be useful, especially in this case if the terms you are searching can be commonly misspelled.

The chart shows that Parmesan has the highest interest, and it's growing over time. Brie is highly seasonal, people in the US seem to enjoy it for Thanksgiving and Winter holiday meals. Mozzarella has sustained interest, and Cheddar experiences a slight increase between October and February. Provolone has very little search interest.

This kind of analysis can help you plan what products to make available depending on the time of the year, and can be useful when managing inventory, if you have a physical store. This data can also help you plan your content. Perhaps you've been preparing a few blog posts, and this data helps you decide on writing Brie-related recipes, as it's relevant to your users.

Performing keyword research

Keyword research is the practice of identifying the words and phrases your audience uses to search for information you offer. If you have a list of terms and topics that are closely related to your business, you can use the tool to identify which of them has a rising search interest; this might point you to relevant terms that are still less known (and consequently less competitive). If you're not sure what keywords to start with, you can check your Search Console Performance report for ideas; the queries tab shows terms you're already ranking for and terms people click when visiting your website.

Researching keywords is relevant to any type of website. For example, if you sell shoes online, you could check shoe brands and models with a rising search interest; if you offer travel packages, you could check holiday trends for travel destinations you work with; and if you have a job search platform, you could check trends related to the jobs you list on your site.

To identify and analyze your terms' search interest, follow these steps:

  1. Visit the Explore tool and add up to 5 terms to the search box. You'll see a timeline with search interest, you can use that to assess which terms have a high interest and which are rising.
  2. If you're targeting multiple countries, a card shows an indication of where your terms are most popular.
  3. Check the related topics and related queries cards. Choose "Top" in the drop down to get ideas on which topics and terms people are most interested in, and choose Rising to get a sense on what has been getting more attention lately.
  4. Check if there are related topics and terms in other languages, which can help if you're considering translating your content or keeping it only in your main language. You can also check your Search Console Performance reports to learn if you're getting traffic from queries in those languages, or countries where the languages are spoken. As mentioned in the previous bullet, make sure the terms and topics are relevant and appropriate for your site, and only then focus on the new terms you find.

Once you find terms that your audience is interested in, which align with your current website, and which you have first-hand experience and expertise in, use the SEO key best practices when optimizing your site for these terms.

Creating a content calendar

Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.

Keep in mind the location of your audience so that you're optimizing for the right people. When analyzing the trends you may notice that they differ across countries, so it's important to analyze different markets separately. In the following example, the US and UK have different trends for the topic Brie: in the US, the topic Brie spikes twice a year, while in the UK it spikes once a year. If you have a UK-based cheese store, it makes sense to publish your Brie content before the Christmas holidays, which is when this topic spikes in the UK on Google Search.

Google Trends interest over time showing how trends can vary by country

Benchmarking against your industry

Google Trends can help you assess how you're performing in comparison to your industry. Understanding the overall trends related to your website (and probably to your competitors) can give you more context into your audience base, such as what else they're searching for. It can also help you understand if a drop or increase in search interest is an industry-wide trend or just related to your site.

For example, suppose you're responsible for an insurance company website, and you've been focusing on the search term "travel insurance". You can use Google Trends to help you in the following ways:

  • If you're experiencing a traffic increase or decrease for "travel insurance", try to identify whether it corresponds to a change in the overall search activity for the industry or if it's related only to your website. Learn how to do this analysis in the debugging drops in Google Search traffic page.
  • If you're trying to understand related terms and topics your target audience is interested in, check the explore tool to find insurance trends for the travel category. Choosing a category in the filters will help you focus your analysis.
  • If you'd like to understand more about your competitors' search interest, add their names to Google Trends. The related topics and terms can help you understand what people search together with these brands. If you operate in multiple regions, you might be interested in how often people search for these brands in each of the subregions, metro areas, and cities available.

Analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

As your business grows, customers might discuss your brand on the web. Knowing what people search about your brand on Google Search can help you find ways to communicate with your audience. For example, if you work for an airways company and you find that many people are searching for your brand name together with an accident that happened, you could write a blog post clarifying the accident details and how you're handling it; or if you find out that people are searching for coupons along with your brand name, you could work on a page explaining if and how to get coupons on your site.

To monitor what people are saying about you, enter your business name in the Explore tool and change the time range to the past thirty or ninety days. In the related search terms section, go through both the "Rising" and the "Top" terms in the list, and make sure to paginate using the arrows below the table. This will give you a good idea of the terms people are using in connection with your brand.

You could download this data monthly, weekly, or even daily to monitor how sentiment around your brand is changing over time. This helps with correlating trends data with other types of data, including from other search engines and social networks. Once the data starts growing beyond manual analysis, using a more advanced solution like Natural Language AI might make sense.

For more tips, watch the Google Trends for SEO tutorial.