Google Trends Adds Cool New Statistical Weighting Features

Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords:

Suppose you own an ice cream shop and don't know which flavors to serve, or suppose you're responsible for stocking supermarkets across the country; Trends can help you explore the popularity and seasonality of your products. To conduct your own, more detailed analyses, you can now easily export Trends data to a .csv file.

How can you use this data to build your business?

• Predict seasonal trends, as mentioned above.
• Better understand the relative volume of keywords to help guide SEO campaigns - especially useful for looking at longtail keyword modifiers given that this keyword data is broad matched.
• Find what areas where different keyword versions are most popular.
• View the brand lift of past marketing campaigns done by competitors (by cross referencing blog citations & Google news mentions with search trend data).
• Better time marketing campaigns based on the performance of past campaigns.
• Monitor how popular keywords come into being, and when derivatives become popular. SEO Book is far more popular than seobook (over 3X as popular - but only 50% more popular this year), and was picked up by Google Trends almost exactly 1 year prior to the less popular version.
• Compare the growth of your brand to competing brands to understand general market growth trends.

It would be nice if Google shared this data for lower volume search terms as well, but they typically only show it for more popular search terms. The one big warning with this trend data is that it is broad matched, as easily seen when comparing credit to credit card & credit cards

• Google Trends data
• Google Traffic Estimator data