Google has just updated its “not-so-popular” keyword research tool – Google Trends. For those who may have forgotten about Google Trends, it’s basically a tool for finding out how popular search terms are across geographic regions, cities and languages.
The addition of a new feature now allows downloading of the graphical chart into a spreadsheet to allow for a better analysis of the search trends for keywords. And whata better and more appropriate way of explaining these features but through an example comparing search trends for two keywords – vanilla ice cream and chocolate ice cream.
The Official Google Blog gave some pretty good examples of the graphical representations of the search performance of those two keywords. For a more detailed discussion check out the Google Blog post (it includes some good looking graphs too)
Basically what makes the new feature useful is the fact that it can help you explore the popularity and seasonality of any products by determining their search performance in Google Search. It would in a way indicate, customer preferences which if analyzed thoroughly could help businesses draft their marketing strategies.
And to make the analysis of the trends easier, Google Trends can now be downloaded into a spreadsheet application. In addition users are also given an option in choosing either relative scaling or fixed scaling on a specific time range when exporting their data into a spreadsheet application.
While this is a good start to fixing the much lamented Google Trends, it is far from being useful. As most SEO experts know it is far better to target specific key phrases than generic broad terms. And unfortunately this latest iteration of Google Trends doesn’t have the ability to track these more specific phrases.
So it’s kind of like adding a cheap paint job to a car that doesn’t even have an engine!
Google trends will prove useful when there are absolute numbers on the graph, which will be never.
Just to chip in about the comments above, Google Trends is a great tool if you know how to use it for SEO. While there are no absolute numbers, if you take the numbers for a known keyword phrase you can estimate the data Google gives you for another.