Keyword Search Trends & Tools: Why Are They So Important?

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Orange book with beads spelling keyword
Keyword trends: how can you best use them to guide your content strategy?

When it comes to online marketing and making the most out of your brand’s presence, it is important to understand keyword trends. Before starting any endeavor, there is data readily available that can show you the popularity history of a product, industry or specific term. The term keyword trends refers to the process of analyzing keyword searches to find which keywords are trending at the present time. Determining which keywords are currently trending for your product or service is important in being able to target marketing campaigns for the best results. Researching trending searches is an important first step to determine if interest in your industry is going up or down.

Keyword Trends Tools

Below are two of the most popular and free keyword trend tools on the market.

Google Trends Review

Computer with graphs: Keyword Trends

Without a doubt, Google Trends is one of most powerful tools for finding trending phrases. When you enter a term, a graph is provided that shows the popularity of term over a certain set of time. To some people, the way the data is presented is confusing because it doesn’t necessarily show how many people are searching for term. Instead, it shows how popular the term is compared to when it was at its peak popularity. The most popular time in history will be at the top of the graph and given a score of 100. Let’s take a look at some examples to illustrate this point.

First, we chose the newspaper industry, because we know overall it has been trending down:

Keyword trends screenshot

As you can see, interest peaked in November 2009 and Google Trends assigned a score of 100 for that month. You can then see how popularity has dropped since.

Now let’s take a look at a search term that we know is close to peak popularity right now, Amazon:

Screenshot: Keyword Trends

This search term is more seasonal, but you can see that it is consistently growing. It peaked in interest in December 2015.

With this data a user can gauge the popularity of a specific term, industry or product. You can look at it geographically and even compare many different terms at the same time.

Google Keyword Planner Review

Google’s Keyword Planner was designed for online marketers looking to run Adwords campaigns. But within the interface is a powerful tool for finding trending keywords. While the Keyword Trends tool above gauge’s interest over time, Keyword Planner shows you the actual number of monthly searches for a term over the last 24 months (and there’s a setting that lets you go back as far as 48 months). This is useful to use in tandem with Keyword Trends so you can see if the term is gaining in popularity and if there are enough monthly searches to make your marketing effort worthwhile.

Let’s take a look at the results of our term Amazon:

Screenshot of Keyword Planner

This shows us that the term Amazon has averaged 68 million searches per month over the last 24 months. It peaked in December 2015 with 101 million searches. The user can drill down on the results by picking locations and languages.

The Best Keyword Trend Tools

Google’s Keyword Trends and Keyword Planner are two great places to start, but there are many other tools on the market that are not free that offer a more robust SEO optimization experience. Because finding the popularity of a term or industry is only the beginning step for keyword research. One most then research competition, implement the marketing plan, create the content and then track the results. There are many keyword research tools out there to help with this process. To learn more read our in-depth review of the best SEO tools on the market. We highly recommend checking it out as you continue on your SEO journey.

Any other services for keyword search trends that you’d recommend? Let us know in the comments!

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