Google Trends is a very useful tool. Since this search engine take up 70% of the search market, it should absolutely be our number one choice of keyword study.Here the link, in case anyone may possibly be unaware of it, http://www.google.com/trends
The question now is not, whether Trends is useful, but really how to use it.
So, how to begin?
If you already have the keywords, type them in the trends search box and hit enter. You will see the page below.
The chart on the left shows the search volume history for the keyword you just entered (here I entered “keyword”). You may well understand from this the change through time of the search volume.
A list to the right of the chart shows the news result for your keyword so that you may obtain a preliminary knowledge of what may appear in the search results.
Right at the bottom, Trends list out the hotness in Regions, Cities and Languages. In my example, people from India appear to search the keyword the most. And the city of Bangalore ranks No.1 in Cities. Strangely, in Language, Indonesian ranks over English. My guess would be that Indonesian was used in more than one country.
You may refine the result by applying filters on the top right. Google provides two filters, Regions and Years. If I want to see how the keyword was searched in Australia and in the year of 2007, I may just apply those two filters. It is very easy. Sub-regions are also provided to further filter the results. You may come across the result that Google says “not enough search volume” if you filter the result too much.
If you do not have specific keyword to market or promote for your site, Trends may also help.
At the Trends home page, Today’s Hot Trends are listed below the search box. The list is top 10 and you may click More Hot Trends to view the top 100. The results come from the US but are representative enough.
If you want to view history results, the top left link “change date” may be useful.
Looking at the list you may be well confused, for there are a lot of keywords that are meaningless, such as fml, fmlife, etc. Discard them. But pay attention to the ones that may be typos which happen a lot. I may guess that fmlife maybe f my life. And I try search this with Google, the number one result tells me it is actually fmylife, which is the name of a very hot site. Tip is, search the keyword yourself and see the result to understand its meaning.
Now choose the keywords that may interest you and market them!
