How does Google Trends help?

Internet Tools

I’ve recently been playing around with the Google Trends tool. At first I dismissed it as a bit of a gimick. I mean, it doesn’t tell me how many searches are done a keyword, just shows a trend line, so I know more people search for “Christmas Cards” in November and December.

Then I thought about this a little. I have a site that is an absolute pile of rubbish as far as traffic goes. Wordtracker assured me a couple of thousand searches a day, and so did Overture. I managed to get this site to number 1 in Google and MSN no problems as there was virtually no competition for the keywords. It gets about 15 visits a day, pretty low for the search volume I’d expected.

Anyhow, I ran the phrase through Google Trends. It said there was not enough search volume to show the graph. This tells me that both Wordtracker and Overture were well out on this phrase.

So that’s at least one good reason to fire your phrase into Google Trends.

notsorich @ May 28, 2006