What Does Google Trends Offer?
Google Trends is an official tool by Google that visualizes the frequency of specific keyword searches and how these searches evolve over time. It’s useful for identifying temporal trends in search queries and also categorizes searches by geographic popularity. This helps in targeting content to specific regions and identifying potential areas for link-building.
Google Trends Only Uses A Sample Of Data
An important fact about Google Trends that Waisberg shared is that the data that Google Trends reports on is based on a statistically significant but random sample of actual search queries.
He said:
“Google Trends is a tool that provides a random sample of aggregated, anonymized and categorized Google searches.”
This does not mean that the data is less accurate. The phrase statistically significant means that the data is representative of the actual search queries.
Google Cleans Noise In The Trends Data
Daniel Waisberg said that Google cleans the data to remove noise and data that relates to user privacy.
An example of private data that is removed is the full names of individuals. An instance of “noise” in the data includes repeated search queries by the same person, such as a trivial daily search for how to boil eggs.
The part about people repeating a search query is intriguing because, in the early days of SEO, before Google Trends was around, SEOs relied on a public keyword volume tool from Overture (owned by Yahoo). Some SEOs manipulated the data by conducting thousands of searches for rarely-used keyword phrases, artificially boosting their query volume. This tactic misled competitors into optimizing for those ineffective keywords.
Google Normalizes Google Trends Data?
Google doesn’t provide the actual search query volumes, such as one query receiving a million searches per day and another getting 200,000. Instead, Google identifies the peak search volume for a keyword phrase and sets that as the 100% benchmark. The Google Trends graph then displays percentages relative to this peak. For instance, if a query’s highest daily search volume is 1 million, a day with 500,000 searches will be shown as 50% on the graph. This process of adjusting the data to relative percentages is known as normalization in Google Trends.
Explore Search Queries And Topics
For over 25 years, SEOs have concentrated on optimizing for keywords. However, Google has since advanced, now categorizing documents based on topics and even the specific queries they relate to, which is more about topics than individual keywords.
In my opinion, one of the most valuable features is the ability to explore topics related to the search query entity. This exploration reveals the search volume for all related keywords.
The “explore by topic” tool provides a potentially more precise understanding of a topic’s popularity, which is crucial because Google’s algorithms, machine learning systems, and AI models create representations of content at the sentence, paragraph, and document levels that align with specific topics. I believe this is one of the aspects referred to when Googlers discuss Core Topicality Systems.
The Big Picture
This video highlights an intriguing point: Google doesn’t display normalized actual search trends but rather a “statistically significant” sample of those trends. A statistically significant sample is one that accurately reflects the actual trends, eliminating the influence of random chance.
Another important takeaway is the reminder that Google Trends is a valuable tool for exploring topics. In my view, it’s more useful than relying on Google Suggest and People Also Ask (PAA) data.
I’ve observed that blindly optimizing with Google Suggest and PAA data can make a website seem more focused on catering to search engines than to real users, which Google specifically warns against. Those affected by recent Google updates should carefully reconsider their SEO strategies, especially regarding keyword usage.
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