28+ must-have content marketing tools
Want to step up your content marketing? Then our guide has all the tools you need to help with everything from generating content ideas and competitor analysis through to content creation, promotion and analysis.
Google Trends: The interest research tool
Overview
Google Trends is a free search analysis tool that shows relative search volumes for keywords and topics. You can think of this as the interest research tool that allows you to monitor search trends over time, compare interest levels and identify emerging trends – or, even, declining trends.
You can enter search queries or topics, compare up to five interests and explore related topics and queries with location settings and filters for time ranges from the past hour, all the way back to 2004.
Key Features
Search trends
Find content ideas by monitoring user interest in topics and search queries.
Interest over time
Monitor search interest over time to view historical changes and spot emerging trends.
Location data
Check search trends by Worldwide interest or specific countries and territories.
Related topics & queries
Find emerging trends by comparing related topics and queries.
Engine filter
Segment data by Web Search, Image Search, News Search, Google Shopping and YouTube.
Google Trends Fig. 1
Benefits & Costs
Pros
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Free
Google Trends is free to use and a powerful tool if you can maximise its potential.
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Scraping
If you build a scraper, you can automatically import data from Google Trends into your own reporting system.
Cons
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Relative data
Google Trends shows relative search volumes ranging from 0-100, not specific figures.
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Limited comparisons
You can only compare up to five search terms or topics.
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No official API
This means you have to build your own scraper to automatically collect data from Google Trends.
