Spotting keyword popularity patterns with Google Trends

Google Trends is a useful tool when trying to determine the timing of a marketing campaign and setting long-range goals. It can also give you a bigger picture than just looking at the traffic for the most recent month or monthly average, which could help you avoid seasonal keywords that have had a high traffic volume recently, but may be getting ready to drop significantly in the near future. You can also avoid keywords that are fading in popularity over time. You can find the tool at https://www.google.com/trends/.

Some keywords are obviously seasonal, such as Christmas recipes and Super Bowl party tips. However, not all seasonal keywords are so obvious. Typing a keyword into Google Trends allows you to view a graph that shows the spikes in search volume for a given term over the past ten years. With such a huge amount of data available, it is easy to see whether the search volume spikes at the same time each year.

Let us take a look at a keyword that has both a seasonal variance, as well as a long-term downward trend in popularity; the keyword is plasma tv. Now, if you think about it, it's easy to see why this keyword is seasonal. A lot of people formerly bought these expensive televisions as a Christmas present for the family, so it makes sense that there is a huge spike in search volume for this keyword at the end of every year. Let us examine a screenshot of Google Trends for the keyword plasma tv:

Two clear trends emerge. First is the confirmation of the end-of-year spike in keyword popularity. Second is the waning popularity of this search term. Plasma TVs, once the rage, were ultimately beaten out in the market by the emergence of LED TVs. plasma tv is a dying keyword. Would 2016 be a good time to launch a blog featuring reviews of Plasma TVs based on the data that Google Trends shows? Probably not. Google Trends is a powerful tool to see seasonal trends and make measured predictions of the future popularity of keywords.

If you want to narrow down the trends even more, you can filter the results in Google Trends by geographic region. You can also view data for each year separately, instead of viewing everything at once. Google Trends also gives links to the top related news stories and charts the location for each on the graph, so you can see what effect these events may have had on the search volume.

Keyword discovery with Google Suggest and Ubersuggest

We've all searched using Google, and we have all noticed that Google.com shows us a waterfall of suggested search terms that attempt to complete our query. This screenshot shows this popular feature:

Google Suggest is a specific feature of the Google search service, but you'll have to use it manually as shown above; there is no web-based interface for the service like with the Keyword Planner tool. The Google Suggest results are delivered in order of popularity, so it is a valuable tool for keyword discovery. Keyword discovery is simply the process of expanding your universe of potential keywords.

A more powerful variant of Google Suggest is Ubersuggest, which you'll find at http://ubersuggest.org/. Ubersuggest simply compiles Google Suggest data and then delivers it in a web-based format, with a range of additional features. Ubersuggest makes it faster and easier to leverage to the keyword discovery potential of Google Suggest. Remember that Ubersuggest is a keyword discovery tool that displays the relative popularity of terms, but doesn't tell you the exact numbers of search queries for each term. For search query volume data, you simply return to Google's Keyword Planner.

Note

Placing your keywords and corresponding search volumes into a spreadsheet makes it easier to sort keywords according to which terms garner the most traffic.