What is Google Trends?

If you are looking for story ideas to inspire ideas or if you are just curious to see what’s trending across the world right now, Google Trends can be a great way to identify topics and see public interest. The platform is essentially an online tool that analyzes Google searches and shows how often a keyword, topic or phrase has been queried over a specific time range. And the best part is that it’s free and anyone can use it.

When using Google Trends, the most important element to utilize will be the search parameters. The geography, time, category and search type sorting options allow you to go as wide or as narrow as you would like when identifying what users are searching. Want to see how a global brand is performing in another country? Change the geography to a different location. Want to see if people are searching for your product under the images, news, video or shopping search tab? Shift the search type option to what you want.

For PR purposes, if you are planning to write a bylined article on a specific topic, using Google Trends can help you identify when the topic is most popular and when you should pitch it to media. For social media marketing purposes, the daily trending topics section tells you what is most relevant today which can be discussed on your social media feeds and used to generate buzz.

While Google Trends will not reveal exactly how many people are searching something worldwide, it is a great identifier of relevance and tells you how topics are performing now compared to other topics or past search performance. If you are looking to go deeper and see more of the numbers side, there are plenty of other platforms to explore that will give you more hard data to use.

Staying on top of what’s trending in the world now and finding new opportunities for your business or a client can be easy with Google Trends.