Google Trends is an online tool provided by Google that shows you what are the popular searches around the web at this time and over recent times, e.g. past hours, days, months, years and since 2004 where the tool began. It allows users to query specific keywords phrases and compare the search trends with other keywords. If you are reading this article in Singapore and you would like to select the location ‘Singapore’ in Google Trends, then you should be navigating to this link.
With these trends, we can easily see consumers’ interests on specific topics over time and the interests over different geographical locations. Below is an example showing people’s interest in eBooks. If you are an entrepreneur considering embarking on a ebook business, this trend will give you a good knowledge of consumer behaviour in ebooks industry.
The trend shows that people are gradually losing interest in ebooks. Photograph by Lorem Ipsum via Unsplash.
Besides the interests over time, you can see interests by geographical region. With your keywords in focus, Google also display the related searches, i.e. people who search for your keywords also search for these topics. The topics and search queries can be sorted by 2 metrics: Top and Rising. What’s the difference between ‘Top’ and ‘Rising’ in the Google chart? Here’s Google definition for the metrics:
* Top – The most popular topics. Scoring is on a relative scale where a value of 100 is the most commonly searched topic, a value of 50 is a topic searched half as often and a value of 0 is a topic searched for less than 1% as often as the most popular topic.
* Rising – Related topics with the biggest increase in search frequency since the last time period. Results marked “Breakout” had a tremendous increase, probably because these topics are new and had few (if any) prior searches
At first glance, for anyone visiting Google Trends, we will often be presented with what’s the most trending topics out in the world. To many, that may be for personal hobbies. However, if you know how to harness the power of Google Trends, you can use it to make important decisions relating to your business.
For Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Marketers, the Google Trends tools should be a Must Have tool. For instance, say if you are in the business of food delivery, and you would like to know if that is a viable business — whether there are demands in your country. Do a search in Google Trends and the below results shows that not only is there a rising trend, the highest searches is in Singapore! So if you are an entrepreneur in the food business in Singapore, it is something you might want to seriously consider.
As seen from the Google Trends chart above, if you are in the food delivery business or planning to enter that industry, you know what type of food your consumers are looking for and who your competitors are.
So Google Trends tool should always be a first tool any CEO, Entrepreneurs and Marketers should go to before venturing into any new business.