Google Trends - A Keyword Research Tool?

**apondonet** · 13-05-06

Google has just recently released their latest offering: Google Trends - http://www.google.com/trends

Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of Googles searches. Several approximations are used when computing your results.

I did a search for the phrase ‘article marketing’ and got very interesting results:

The top ten ‘Search Cities’ are:

1. Delhi, India
2. Paris, France
3. Sydney, Australia
4. Chicago, United States
5. Toronto, Canada
6. New York, United States
7. London, United Kingdom

By Regions:

1. Pakistan
2. Malaysia
3. Indonesia
4. Iran
5. India
6. Philippines
7. Singapore
8. Thailand
9. France
10. United States

These are some telling statistics which could be used by authors when writing articles. The new Google Trends tool helps you identify which market is hot.

Google trends is basically a more targeted Keyword Research tool that can help article authors target their audience with greater precision.

Take Google Trends for a test drive: http://www.google.com/trends

**Edwin** · 16-05-06

It's confusing, but if you dig into how Google defines the city/region rankings, you'll see that they're based on percentage of all searches for that city/ranking.

For example, if "car insurance" was searched 200x in London, and the total volume of ALL searches made by people in London was 20,000, then it's 1% of the searches.

Now if "car insurance" was searched 2x in Monaco, but there were only 20 searches of any kind carried out in Monaco, then it's 10% of the searches.

Google Trends would then list the results as follows:-

Monaco
London

Even though the VOLUME of searches for "car insurance" by people in Monaco was only 1% of the volume of searches carried out by people in London.

Same for regions, same for languages. So the only use for that data (that I can see) is to try and spot what people in certain countries or regions find more relevant than other stuff they're looking for. But it gives absolutely no "comparative" data to verify search volumes by country or region.

**apondonet** · 17-05-06

I guess then it's just a rough indicator like the Amazon's Alexa ToolBar which registers user traffic even when you are refreshing your own pages with the toolbar installed in your browser.