What is Google Trends?


Google Trends is not your average SEO tool. For those of us in e-commerce and drop shipping, this is quite useful in letting you know seasonal trends for certain products - or your location. You can even use it to outwit competitors by monitoring their positions. In this article, we'll explain how to monitor everything from YouTube statistics to the Google Trends compare feature. But most importantly, we'll show you how to use Google Trends to maximize your business. So, let's get down to it. 


In this article, we'll cover how to use Google Trends for your content strategy and five practical ways to take advantage of it:

  • Find currently trending topics.
  • Identify seasonal trends.
  • Improve your local SEO strategy
  • Monitor your competitors.
  • Improve your SEO strategy

Let's jump 

How to Use Google Trends

How does Google Trends work?

You can explore Google Trends from top to bottom by going to the tool and seeing what searches are currently trending, then digging into a topic for more information. For example, Google Trends recently shared information about trending searches related to Hurricane Irma, such as the top related search terms across the United States.



You can also scroll down to see general information about current trends in your country.

Here are five ways you can use Google Trends to improve and complement your existing content strategy.

1 : Find Currently Trending Topics

Finding trending topics can help you plan content, identify unique angles, and even just stay relevant as a brand.

From the Google Trends homepage, scroll down to see "recently trending" topics around the world:

Identity Seasonal Trends

A seasonal trend is a trend that returns regularly, usually around a certain holiday.

By researching trending topics in Google Trends, you can find out when to start advertising for your next big vacation.

Say you own a flower shop. You may see regular increases in sales and searches around Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.

To get started, type in a keyword and press Enter. Let's use "Flowers for Valentine's Day".


Then, use the dropdown to adjust the date range. Seven days is the default, but you can choose from recent to 2004 as the last hour.


It is best to go back at least a few years to get accurate weather trend information.


"Flowers for Valentine's Day" starts getting traffic from February 7th to February 13th. This is data you can use to plan the launch of your marketing campaigns.

You can also research hard-to-predict trends.

Say you create content for an insurance company. You can look back several years to get an idea of ​​when hurricane season typically hits, then create content and marketing campaigns around that time.
Going back a few years will also tell you if a trending topic is a seasonal trend or just a passing fad. If traffic increases at the same time each year for a keyword, it's a trend.

If not, it's likely an obsession.

Take the Ice Bucket Challenge, for example. Before and after August 2014, it had very little traffic.

Plan Google Shopping Ads by Season

Because obsolescence fades quickly, creating long-term content or designing marketing campaigns around them may not be a good use of time or money.

Start by entering a keyword and toggling from "Web Search" to "Google Shopping." We chose “wedding guest dresses” for our keywords.

Look at the results to see when interest peaks:

Things start to pick up again in January and February, so running shopping ads during this time frame can give you a head start. Running ads in the spring and summer months would also be a safe bet.

Google Trends allows you to view keyword popularity worldwide or by country, subregion, metro area, or city.

Optimize Your Local SEO Strategy

Let's use an obvious example: surfboards. It is unlikely that people in landlocked areas of the US will want to buy it.

When we toggle by subregion, we can see that people in California and Hawaii are much more interested in surfboards than the rest of the states:

To find even more data, let’s change our search to only cover Hawaii. We now see that interest in surfboards remains consistent throughout the year:

Perform Local Keyword Research

If you're a local business owner, you'll probably want to learn more about what's trending in your area versus what's trending nationally or globally.

See what's trending locally to plan content that your customers are actually interested in.

You can search for "Honda Dealership" and narrow down the scope to your city only:

Monitor Your Competitors

Circle back to the Google Trends Compare tool to see how your brand stacks up against the competition.

We'll use Netflix and Hulu for this example. In this case, it is probably more useful to set the time frame back a few years to get a better overview of their relative performance.

We can see that the competition has been steady over the past five years, with Netflix comfortably leading: