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For those of you that blog about current affairs or perhaps sell the latest gizmo’s, computers, or need a comprehensive Internet research tool, there is no better way to stay on the cutting edge than utilizing the advanced features offered by Google Trends.
Google Trends is a simple concept. It tells the users what people throughout the world are searching for. Google Insights is Google trends’ big brother that has advanced filters that allow you to identify search trends by time, geographical location, keyword, and even compare interest in a particular keyword or phrase based on two different years.
Image if you could find out what each individual city in the world is interested in, and could then go off and write about what people in that particular city want to read about or you could perhaps sell those products that people wanted.
Maybe you want to beat your competition and find out when people start searching for Christmas decorations, presents etc. If you knew this information you could start selling your products when the consumer is ready to buy it. Google Trends gives you just this ability.
Today for example to top ten highest searched phases on Google for the USA: -
It’s interesting that the topic of 10 people being gunned down in German didn’t get a mention in the top 10 highest searches phrases in USA. It didn’t even get a mention in the top 100. However the terrible shooting in the US did get a mention (No 6).
Google trends can also give you search trends on the most popular websites. In the US the 10 ten websites by traffic today are: -
You can filter these searches by any country, and it will even give you a graph of recent activity. In UK the most popular websites are: -
| 1. |  yelp.co.uk |
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| 2. | amazon.co.uk |
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| 3. | tfl.gov.uk |
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| 4. | nhs.uk |
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| 5. | tvguide.co.uk |
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| 6. | nationaltrust.o |
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| 7. | thisismoney.co. |
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| 8. | rspb.org.uk |
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| 9. | allinlondon.co. |
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| 10. | nationalrail.co |
Based on the above information, the National Health Service is working over time as usual.
Say your in London and you want to open a new store. Google trends would be able to show you what the top searched phrases/ products or keywords people in Sydney are searching for, whether there is a seasonal habit to this search, and if there is a dip in interested over time (such as January) and even how 2008′s interest compared to 2005.
Google trends gives you an insight into what people want and can really assist in increasing traffic for your blog, product or service. If you use iGoogle as you homepage, add the Google Trends gadget to your iGoogle page and stay informed on the hot topics every day – click here to get the gadget. If you don’t have an iGoogle homepage yet, I would highly recommend getting one. Click here for more information on iGoogle and how to open a new iGoogle account.
There is an alternative to the Google trends site, and it is called OneRiot.com. One Riot is similar to Google Trends, it is nowhere near as advanced as google trends yet is more graphically pleasing than Google Trends. OneRiot is really more of a search engine than a research tool like Google Trends; OneRiot indexes there website differently to other search engines by basing the hierarchical index in popularity, this popularity it calls the “pulse”. By basing indexing on interest/ popularity OneRiot is more up to date that other search engines because it focuses more on what is current and give less attention to the achieved websites that sit and fester with no love. Have a look at OneRiot.com by clicking here.
We are all aware of the credit crunch and the problems with mortgages, so I thought it would be interesting to see what the trends were in the search phrase “home loans”.
The results showed that towards the end of 2008 when things were really getting bad, people started searching less and less for this phrase (which is understandable), in fact October, November represented the worst months for the last two years for the search phrase “home loans”.
However, wouldn’t it be reasonable to think that the searching for this phrase would go up in these last months of 2008, as home loans became more difficult to secure due to a lack of credit available from banks. Maybe, the public were sick of hearing about how bad things are going to get and just switched off, or maybe we all just thought there was no point searching for a home loans in these awful economic times. Interestingly, it appears that Australian’s were the most concerned about home loans, despite Australia being in a better than average economic position.
The below graph shows the search trends in the phrase “home loans”. As you can see interest in home loans is starting to rise, which must be a good sign……..
Do research on Google recently I came across this site which talks about how to get hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of Google ads for free, a very interesting concept indeed. I thought it worth a read – click here.
Have a look at this great video on Google Trends and how to interpret and use the data……great stuff.
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