Google Trends Keyword Comparison Tool

The tool is based on showing comparisons, so searching for only one term will only show a trend line, but with nothing to compare it to the data is a little meaningless.

The tool can be used to identify the most common alternatives to your keywords. You can type in a comma-separated list of related keywords into the search box and Trends will show you a graphical representation of the search volume over time. You can use this to target your content and keywords for higher search volume keywords.

Visualising Google data with Trends

For example, say your site was dealing with protective eyewear; your keywords may be "safety glasses", "safety spectacles" and goggles. Plugging these into Google Trends shows that the term goggles is searched far more than safety glasses, with safety spectacles coming last with no search data. You may as well not have spectacles in your keywords because they are not searched for, thus creating more space for important keywords. Google Trends doesn't tell you how competitive those keywords are, but you can get the best guess between comparable keywords and optimise for the more popular. After all, there's not much point in putting in a lot of time and effort to try to get good search rankings for keywords for which no one is searching.

Google Trends

Another feature of Google Trends is its ability to overlay news related to the search term, showing how events affect search popularity. This feature is good for picking up on trending topics.

Click to Visit: Google Trends

Tutorial Series

This post is part of the series Search Engine Optimisation. Use the links below to advance to the next tutorial in the couse, or go back and see the previous in the tutorial series.

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