Google Trends: New SEO tool on the block

Thursday, May. 11 2006 | Author: J. Angelo Racoma

Did you know that “good” is more popular than “evil?”

At least with Google, this is the case. According to a Google Trends query comparing the two keywords, “good” maintains a considerable margin over “evil” in terms of search volume. And “good” also has the lead in terms of mentions on Google News articles.

Good (blue) beats Evil (red) anytime!

Google Trends is the latest beta release from Google Labs. The new service lets users compare trends in search query volumes for up to five keywords or phrases. Users are also presented trends in how frequent the keywords are mentioned in Google News stories.

You also get trends in terms of the region, city, and language topping the search volumes. Trends also provides links to some items of potential interest, which are usually related to the peaking points in the search trends.

Some useful ways you can use Trends:

Compare singular with plural forms of a keyword (i.e., “car” vs “cars”)
Compare permutations of keywords/phrases (i.e., “blog” vs “blogging”)
Compare across synonyms (i.e., “laptop” vs “notebook”)
Compare relative popularity between two (or among several) personalities or concepts across time (i.e., “Bush” vs “Kerry”)
Just play around (i.e., “right” vs “wrong”)

Of course, you can also use Trends to track search volumes for one keyword/phrase through time, and determine trends from such data. For instance, a query on “Iraq” would bring up a result graph that spikes mid-2004, and some news items corresponding to world events that may have influenced the interest in the keyword (as gleaned from the spikes in the search volume) are highlighted.

I do find the regional data to be a bit off, though. I find it quite weird for the most unlikely of countries to be leading in the search volumes for the keywords I’ve checked out.

While this is yet another tool those into SEO (search engine optimization) would find useful, it sure is great to be able to play around with search data for the rest of us!