Google Shares Five Practical Insights from Google Trends for Improving SEO and Resolving Search Traffic Issues.

Google released a video revealing five valuable insights from Google Trends that can aid in SEO, topic research, and resolving search ranking issues. The video, hosted by Daniel Waisberg, a Google search Advocate, offers practical tips and strategies.

1. What Does Google Trends Offer?

Google Trends is an official tool created by Google that displays how often specific keyword phrases are searched and how these searches evolve. It’s valuable not only for identifying time-based changes in search queries but also for segmenting queries by geographic popularity. This helps determine the content’s target audience and identify optimal geographic areas for link-building. This information is invaluable for diagnosing issues with organic traffic, as it can reveal seasonal and consumer trends.

2. Google Trends Only Uses a Sample of Data

Waisberg shared an important fact about Google Trends: The data it reports on is based on a statistically significant but random sample of actual search queries.

He explained:

“Google Trends is a tool which provides a random sample of aggregated, anonymized, and categorized Google searches.”

This does not mean that the data is less accurate. The term “statistically significant” indicates that the data represents search queries.

Google uses a sample because they have an enormous amount of data, and it’s simply faster to work with samples that accurately reflect actual trends.

3. Google Cleans Noise in the Trends Data

Daniel Waisberg explained that Google cleans the data to remove noise and any information that could compromise user privacy.

He stated:

“The search query data is processed to remove noise in the data and anything that might compromise a user’s privacy.”

For example, private data such as individuals’ full names are removed. Noise in the data includes repeated search queries by the same person, such as a daily search for how to boil eggs.

This aspect of data cleaning is notable because, before Google Trends existed in the early days of SEO, SEOs used a public keyword volume tool by Overture (owned by Yahoo). Some SEOs manipulated the data by making thousands of searches for rarely queried keyword phrases, inflating their volume to mislead competitors into optimizing for useless keywords.

4. Google Normalizes Google Trends Data

Google Trends doesn’t display actual search query volumes, such as one query receiving a million searches per day and another receiving 200,000. Instead, Google selects the peak search volume for a keyword phrase as the 100% mark and adjusts the Google Trends graph to show percentages relative to that peak. For example, if the highest number of searches for a query in a day is 1 million, then a day with 500,000 searches will be represented as 50% on the graph. This process of adjusting the data to percentages relative to the peak search volume is what is meant by Google Trends data being normalized.

5. Explore Search Queries and Topics

For over 25 years, SEOs have concentrated on optimizing for keywords. However, Google has evolved beyond keywords; it now categorizes documents by topics and queries that are relevant to them. This shift makes exploring the issues related to search queries particularly valuable. Delving into related topics reveals query volumes for all associated keywords.

The “explore by topic” feature provides a more accurate understanding of a topic’s popularity. This is crucial because Google’s algorithms, machine learning systems, and AI models represent content at various levels—sentence, paragraph, and document—based on topics rather than individual keywords. This approach aligns with what is referred to as Core Topicality Systems.

Waisberg explained:

“On the Explore page, you’ll often have the option to select a topic besides the search term. For instance, when searching for ‘cappuccino,’ you can choose between the exact search term ‘cappuccino’ or the broader ‘cappuccino coffee drink’ topic. This topic encompasses related search terms, including exact matches, misspellings, acronyms, and multiple languages, making it particularly useful for global data analysis.

By using topics, you can filter out unrelated terms. For example, when researching trends for ‘Alphabet,’ you might select the ‘Alphabet Inc company’ topic to avoid results related to other meanings of the term ‘alphabet.'”

The Big Picture

An intriguing fact revealed in the video is that Google Trends displays a normalized “statistically significant” sample of actual search trends rather than showing normalized actual search volumes. A statistically significant sample means the data is representative of the exact search trends, with random chance minimized.

Another key takeaway is the value of exploring topics in Google Trends, which is more valuable than relying on Google Suggest and People Also Ask (PAA) data.

There is evidence that overly focusing on Google Suggest and PAA data can make a website seem optimized for search engines rather than for users, something Google explicitly warns against. Those affected by recent Google Updates should carefully reconsider how their SEO practices align with keyword strategies.

If you still need help, consider checking out our monthly SEO packages. Let our experts help you in navigating the complexities of SEO.