Google has recently shared some insights into how its tool, Google Trends, operates. This tool is crucial for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), topical studies, and understanding search rankings.
In a video, Search Advocate at Google, Daniel Waisberg, revealed that Google Trends collates information from various sources, comprising Google Search, Google News and YouTube, to track the overall interest in specific keywords or topics over time.
Waisberg also discussed the importance of comprehending regional data when studying trends and the role of seasonality in affecting search trends. Other features of Google Trends were also mentioned, such as the ability to compare the popularity of multiple search terms and explore connected queries. However, according to Waisberg, Google Trends is just one of numerous tools for digital marketers and should be supplemented with additional data sources and research methods.
Google Trends helps monitor the frequency of specific keyword phrases in Google’s search queries, showing the growth and changes in popularity over time, making it a valuable resource for market research and news reporting.
Besides presenting data in easily readable graph format, the tool provides related queries and topics, helping users better understand the broader context. One significant advantage is the ability to compare multiple terms and their popularity over time.
This tool can assist with insights into demographic targeting and finding geographic areas for website backlinks, flag up shifts in seasons and user activity, and uncover opportunities for website optimization for better search engine visibility. Identifying the most popular pages on your site allows you to understand what resonates with your audience, thus helping you strategize for more content of the same kind.
However, Waisberg has provided some clarifications too. Google Trends uses only a sample of actual search queries due to the vast amount of searchable data and becomes more manageable with representative examples.
Understanding Google Trends: Features and Functionality
Privacy concerns result in disregarding repeated queries from a single user. Thus, any trend reflected on the platform indicates a broader public interest over individual search behaviors. Google Trends also filters out spam or irrelevant queries, ensuring accurate representation of user search patterns with anonymized and normalized data.
Google Trends is stringent about data privacy and relevance. It removes irrelevant data and information that could breach user privacy. Also, it processes the collected data thoroughly to maintain transparency and relevance, discarding any information that does not contribute to the overall trend analysis. All the surviving data is categorized using Google’s predefined classes, anonymized, aggregated, and presented in a privacy-compliant manner.
To conclude, Google Trends presents data in relative terms rather than actual search numbers. For example, it denotes the peak popularity of a keyword as 100%, and subsequent popularity figures are relative to this peak. Hence, a score of 50 means that at that time, the keyword was half as popular as at its peak, allowing for easy comparisons over various periods and searches.
