On Google Trends, there are some little-known features that can be useful for quickly spotting trends and refining your searches.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a completely free tool developed by Google that allows you to track and analyze the popularity of queries made on the Google search engine over time. You can enter the keyword of your choice and see how often it was entered into Google. You can also compare it with other terms to see which is the most popular, or even find out the geographic area where it is most searched. Discover below 5 tips to refine your searches and better understand web trends.
1. Use punctuation to refine your searches
On Google Trends you can refine and specify the results of your searches using 3 punctuation marks:
- Quotation marks: These allow you to highlight search results that only come from terms contained within the quotation marks. If you want to look at the trend only for the term electric bike, you can put the keywords in quotation marks and thus not have the results for electric bike or electric bike rack.
- The + sign: This feature allows you to expand the search result to include all the terms entered. For example, if you type Electric bike+Tenways, Google will give you the search volume for electric bike plus the search volume for the bike brand Tenways.
- The – sign: this option allows you to exclude a specific word from the results. Continuing with our example, you can add -price to your first query to access results less oriented towards merchant sites.
2. Analyze search trends on YouTube
Google Trends allows you to conduct targeted searches, such as specific analyses of YouTube trends using the available filters (see image below). At a glance, you can identify the most popular keywords on the video platform and thus identify the most relevant terms to attract more audiences to your YouTube content.
3. Visualize search trends on Google Shopping
Similar to the refined search for trends on YouTube, you can analyze and visualize the most searched keywords in Google Shopping. This can be a valuable tool for your online stores to accurately target trending products and the terms users are typing to make purchases. You can use this tool to see if certain products are more popular during a specific time of year, such as chocolates at Easter or game consoles around Christmas.
4. Integrate trend results into your visuals or websites
You can save and share the results of trends analyzed on Google Trends. There are several possible methods for doing this:
- Download data: By clicking the download button in the top right corner of the trend chart, you can save your analysis with your custom filters in CVS format, so you can insert it into Excel or another spreadsheet. This can help you with your business intelligence or market research to find the best solutions for you or your business.
- Share a link: Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. So, you can simply share the link to the search page with your filters and updated results by copying and pasting the URL into your browser’s address bar.
- Embed on your website: Google Trends also generates HTML code for you to embed your search results as a graph on your blog or business website. You can check the ” Keep data up to date” box to have the graph update automatically.
5. Use advanced filters to compare data from one country to another
Google Trends allows you to compare search results by country, which can be very useful for targeting your customers. In the example below, we compared search results for the term UEFA Champions League in France and Belgium over the past 12 months to determine which country is most popular. We recommend changing the language used depending on the selected country to avoid falsifying the results. For our example, if you want to compare trends with the United Kingdom, we recommend writing Champions League.
