Using Google Trends to Select Website Keywords

Published by Naveed at 5:57 PM under

Compare Search Keyword Popularity at a Glance with Google Trends

If you have a home business and want to increase traffic to your website, one thing you'll want to do is select the keywords that will draw traffic to your website. Google Trends is a keyword research tool that can help you see at a glance how many people are searching on Google for the keywords you're considering. Since Google is far and away the search engine of choice, the information provided can prove to be quite helpful.

The Importance of Keywords and Keyword Selection

Keywords are those words that web surfers use to conduct a search. A keyword can consist of a single word, such as "bicycles" or an entire phrase, like "ten speed mountain bikes".

Performing keyword research involves taking the time to discover which keywords your website visitors are most likely to be searching for, and among those search terms, which keywords your site has the best chance of ranking highly in search engine results pages.

Efficient keyword selection is a balance between the popularity of a keyword or keyword phrase and the competition that already exists in trying to rank for that keyword phrase.

You can also use highly popular keywords as part of a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign, such as Google AdWords. Suggested bidding prices on more competitive keywords can be considerably more expensive, but since you can manage your daily limit for click-throughs, you may want to ante up to outbid your competitors, and still stay within your advertising budget if you believe the traffic for your selected keywords will result in a good probability that your PPC visits will utlimately result in sales.

Google Trends as a Keyword Tool

There are a number of free tools you can use to research how many times per day website visitors are likely to conduct a search for your target keyword. One example is Digital Point's Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. Using this tool, you can type in the keyword "bicycles" and the tool returns numbers that represent how many times that phrase is searched for, along with the number of times related terms, such as "tandem bicycles", are used in search queries. You can then drill down farther by clicking one of the results, such as "girls bicycles".

Using Google Trends, you can compare how often your target keywords are searched for in a matter of seconds. For example, let's say you're not sure which would be a more popular keyword, "bicycles" or "bikes". Open Google Trends in your browser by going to www.google.com/trends. Once the Google Trends tool opens, type "bicycles, bikes" in the box. You don't need the quote marks, but you do need a comma between each search term or keyword phrase you want to check. You can enter as many as 5 comma-separated keyword phrases at a time. When you're finished, click the Search Trends button.

Google Trends returns a color-coded graph that shows the frequency for which your specified terms were used in a Google search query for the past three calendar years. Using the bicycles, bikes example, you can see nearly instantly that the term "bikes" is used in search far more often than "bicycles" and that "bikes" has held this edge consistently over the entire time line. Therefore, those who are looking for bicycles in Google are far more likely to use "bikes" in their search than they would use "bicycles". You might logically deduce this on your own, since it's faster to type "bikes" than it is to spell out "bicycles".

Google Trends also allows you to compare at a glance the volume of news stories related to the keywords you're comparing and provides a bar chart that breaks down the results by selected cities, selected world regions and by selected world languages.

Finally, Google Trends will also show a hyperlinked list of news references to those keywords. The comparison graph will show when those references were published on the web.

Google Trends' Shortcomings for Keyword Selection

What Google Trends doesn't tell you is the specific number of times your specified keywords were actually searched on. But, you have other tools, like the Digital Point tool mentioned earlier and a number of others that can give you that information.

Google Trends also doesn't tell you how competitive those keywords are - meaning the number of search results returned for those keywords. There are also free tools that can do that for you, or you can simply perform a search on "bicycles" and compare the number of search results to the number of search results for "bikes".

If the number of results is low, you won't get any results at all, but Google will tell you that there were insufficient results. If no results are available, you may want to rule out targeting that keyword or phrase. After all, there's not much point in putting in a lot of time and effort to try to get good search rankings for a keyword for which no one is searching.