What Google Trends can tell us about knee injuries and porn habit research

Over the last few years, Google has reduced the amount of data it gives away free to webmasters. Long gone are the days of Pagerank and landing page keywords. However, there is still one tool that can be used to see what’s going on on the internet: See what is most searched on Google with Google Trends.

Google Trends shows which words are most searched on Google over time. Not compared to each other, but compared to themselves. You can use this tool to see patterns of when and how people search for different topics.

Google Trends example 1, the World Cup.

As you can see from the graph, search interest in the term “World Cup” has a spike every fourth year. Coinciding with the World Cup. The graph shows interest from a scale of 0 to 100. Google doesn’t tell us how many people search for “World Cup”, it just tell us that in June 2014 the search volume of “World Cup” was 83% of the record in June 2018.

This can be used to figure out when it’s a good time to market different types of goods and services.

Google Trends example 2, Halloween costumes

Not surprising at all, the hunt for a good halloween costume peaks yearly the last week of October.

You can also look closer and see at what hours the searches are done.

Google Trends example 3, Pizza searches in Sweden

We can see that Swedes are especially craving Pizza at 5 and 6 in the afternoon. That’s when the typical swede eats dinner. The three massive spikes on the left are Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Weekends are busy times for pizzerias.

It can be used for serious science

Scientists have used the tool for a wide variety of research. Everything  from assessing seasonal variation in knee injuries (turns out April is the most dangerous month) to the pornography habits of internet users (turns out people lie about them in self-reporting studies).

How you can use it in your e-commerce business

If you have an e-commerce business, there are many ways in which you can use this tool to increase your business. Are you looking at introducing new product lines? Then check out which ones have an increasing trend before ordering product descriptions.  If you have a Twitter account, you can do flash advertising. Google Trends can be dissected down to the minute. If you see peaks in certain searches, you can write a good tweet and catch the waves. Just make sure you have all the landing pages set up in time.

And, if your products are seasonal, you can plan your staff vacation by looking at seasonal trends. You can also use it to figure out which keywords should be used in different regions.

We all know it’s cool to be trendy, which is why we’re always there to keep you trending! Sign up with Topcontent today for the freshest of engaging content – we can write about anything (have a look at Topcontent reviews to see what we are talking about).

Share this post: