Google Trends: find what are people searching for online
Written by Simon Cox
Simon (l) and Rachael (r) posing for the camera with their paint brushes, paint and Spring flowers!
In this article:
Why is it so hard finding out what people are searching for online?
How can I find out what people are searching for online?
How can I use Google Trends to find out what people are searching for online?
This article is from one of our recent Content Corners: Content Corner is your website questions answered; a weekly Q&A on Instagram to help you create great website content that attracts, engages & boosts your SEO.
It's not simply enough to have a website; you need to be creating content that will help your website be found by Google in a search result. We want to ensure that we can answer your questions on blogging, blog topics, structuring blog articles, improving existing blogs & tracking your progress too.
After seeing Wildings Studio's brilliant posts on the importance of blogging, I finally carved out some time this week to sit down and create not one, but two new blogs!
Wildings is a website designer for small business. We are based in Torquay and offer website design for interior designers and garden designers. We work from Devon with small businesses across the UK. This is our ‘your website questions answered’ Content Corner series with weekly tips and advice on how to get the best out of your website, specifically developing blog content that attracts visitors and helps you get found by search engines.
Why is it so hard finding out what people are searching for online?
One of the biggest challenges that we have when it comes to producing website or blog content is 'what do people want to see?'. If we don't know what people are searching for online it is very difficult to write content that will bring them to our websites.
As we've said before, Google is constantly crawling website pages across the internet to assess the quality of their content. If it's great content that answers people's questions or provides the info they're looking for, it will likely be more visible in search results. Being visible in a search result drives more traffic to your website. The more traffic you get, the better you can hit your business goals like leads, enquiries or sales.
So before writing anything on our websites we need to understand what are people looking for via Google or a search engine in the first place that would then lead them to the content on our website.
Read more: Using ChatGPT content in my website blog: is it a good idea?
How can I find out what people are searching for online?
My top tip for working out what people are searching for online in order to write better content via your blog is to use Google Trends.
Google Trends allows you to see what's trending as well as popular across Google Searches. It's free and you don't need an account.
The reason Google Trends is so powerful is that it allows you to identify popular seasonal trends. These are searches that tend to recur predictably every year or particular period. If you write good quality content on your blog that helps people with queries related to these seasonal searches, you can harness traffic on an exponentially bigger level, plus the partner is more likely to appear next time, meaning you don't need to write the content from scratch (you can improve it).
Read more: Video or words: which is better for website & blog SEO?
How can I use Google Trends to find out what people are searching for online?
This is a very basic introduction to Google Trends, how it works in overview and some of its basic features that you can use to help you start to understand what people are searching for online via Google and search engines. Once you’ve got the hang of this you can then use it to generate blog titles for your website (and obviously write the necessary content!).
What can Google Trends do?
Google Trends can show you what people are searching for almost in real time, which is handy if you want to create content in the moment that responds to current events. What we're more interested in is the historical data. Google Trends allows you to go back to 2024 and see long term trends.
Trends also allows you to explore freely if you want to dig into keywords, topics and the data to get more granular or discover trends closely related to your business. Once you have the info, you can filter it by 'Rising' or 'Top' so that you can pick apart what's seasonal or a fad from what's most popular overall.
Things to bear in mind before using Google Trends
Trends is pretty user friendly but the main thing to remember is that you don't get answers on a plate; you need to be prepared to go down a few rabbit holes and circle back in order to land on the key insights. Once you've used it a few times, you'll get the hang of it, but it's an iterative process.
The other thing to bear in mind is that it doesn't generally produce blog titles. You tend to get two-word key phrases or the odd one or two longer search queries. However, you can then extrapolate from those and generate your blog titles.
How to start using Google Trends
Where can I find Google Trends and what are it’s functions?
Navigate to Google Trends via trends.google.com or google.com/trends
Head to the Explore tab trends.google.com/trends/explore
At this point there's a few things you can do:
Put your search term in the search bar
Adjust the time period - examining a month for the previous year allows you to get an idea of seasonal searches
Filter by a specific category - we find Homes & Gardens particularly helpful when thinking about interior designers or garden designers
Using Related topics and related queries in Google Trends
If we put in the search term 'garden design' for the past 12 months, we can explore the topic via ‘Related topics’, which as you can imagine means that users searching for your term also searched for these topics. Some related topics (at time of writing) include:
Terraced house (topic)
New construction (topic)
Backyard (topic)
Garden design (topic)
House & Garden (magazine)
As you can see, most of these are still fairly high level, so you need to click on them and start to explore what’s going on behind these trends in order to get at the specific searches or events that were going on.
There's also a ‘Related queries’ area, which means users searching for your term also searched for these queries. Related queries include: heartwood garden design, richard miers garden design, dig garden design and ai landscape design free.
As you can see, the topics are often quite broad and high level, so you will need to click on them and explore what’s going on behind them - this is where you may go down a few rabbit holes, but it’s part of the process. Sometimes it will be because they are high profile people or businesses; sometimes it’s because of a high profile event; other times it will e because something went viral on social media.
Discovering insights via Top and Rising filters in Google Trends
You can now filter related topics and related queries via ‘Top’ and ‘Rising’. Top means the most popular search queries overall so allows you to rank ideas and avoid pursuing a one-off trend.
Rising means that these are the queries with the biggest increase in search frequency since the last time period. This is helpful as it tells you search terms that are more seasonal and so more likely to crop again in future. Pay attention to these as content on these topics is more evergreen, which is what we want, as it’s far easier to curate material that popular in a predictable way rather than constantly generate new items about whose popularity we are less sure.
Additionally, certain Rising queries are marked with ‘Breakout’ which means they had a particularly significant increase - they spiked. These are either extremely popular or reflected an isolated incident, such as a new event.
How to create blog post titles from Google Trends
Once you've dug in and out of the topics and queries you should have a short list of quality topics. It's now time to turn these into blog titles. A good place to start is to type them in Google and then consult the ‘People also asked’ box.
People also ask suggests the questions that people commonly search for on Google and are questions related to your search terms. These are a helpful as a next step because you get a more fully formed question than in Google Trends.
Read more: How to structure a blog post for better SEO & engagement
Final thoughts on Google Trends
Overall, Google Trends is a really really good starting place for what people are searching for online and then developing your blog titles further for writing up. Use Google Trends as the starting place for researching and producing your content.
