Google Trends: know when, and with which words, your customers search

What Google Trends measures: an index from 0 to 100

“Google Trends” is searched 60,500 times a month in France, and “google tendance” 390 times: Google Tendances is the French name of the same tool. It works on a sample of real searches, anonymised and grouped, and Google explains how it transforms them:

1. 1
   Each data point is divided by the total searches in the same area and over the same period: it measures a share of interest, not a number.
2. 2
   The results are then scaled from 0 to 100, according to the topic’s proportion of all searches.
3. 3
   Two regions showing the same value therefore do not necessarily have the same search volume.

Compare words to choose the one for your page

The first use, and the most profitable: comparing the different ways of saying the same thing. Google lets you compare up to 8 groups of terms at once, with up to 50 terms per group. Misspellings, synonyms and plurals are not grouped automatically: it is up to you to put them in the same group.

1. 1
   Choose the country (France, for our data) and a long period, five years, to smooth out accidents.
2. 2
   Enter the variants your customers might type: the name of the trade, the name of the service, the technical word and the everyday word.
3. 3
   Group variants with + (for example “devis toiture + devis couverture”, two French ways of saying roofing quote) to compare families of words rather than single words.
4. 4
   Use quotation marks for an exact phrase, and the minus sign to exclude a meaning that does not concern you.
5. 5
   Keep the dominant term for the title and H1 of the page; the others go in the text and the FAQ.

Spot your trade’s season, and publish ahead of it

The five-year curve shows whether your trade has a season, as you might expect for heating, air conditioning, gardening or removals: check it for yours rather than assuming it. What matters is not the peak, it is the moment the curve starts to rise.

Google warns that crawling a page can take from a few days to a few weeks. A seasonal page is published or updated before the rise, not during the peak.

1. 1
   Show five years for your main service, in France and then in your region.
2. 2
   Note the month when the curve starts each year, and the month when it falls back.
3. 3
   Publish or update the page concerned a few weeks before the start, and request indexing in Search Console.
4. 4
   Time your advertising to the same season if you run any: that is when every euro spent finds the most searchers.

Related searches: page ideas, already validated

At the bottom of each exploration, Trends shows two lists. Top searches are those people made with your term in the same session. Rising searches are those whose volume grew the most over the period, with their rate of increase.

When Trends shows “Breakout” instead of a percentage, Google states that the search grew by more than 5,000%: it is often a new need, a new rule or a new product on which few pages exist yet.

• Top searches give your customers’ lasting questions: one page or one FAQ entry each.
• Rising searches give the topics to cover quickly, provided they really concern your offer.
• Filter by category when a word has several meanings.

An idea taken from Trends remains a hypothesis: the page must bring something true and useful (a data point, a price, an experience). Creating one page per search variant to capture traffic is precisely what Google classes as scaled content abuse.

The limits of Trends, and what to cross it with

• No volume: Trends gives relative popularity. Monthly volume is read in Google’s Keyword Planner.
• Not your data: Trends talks about the market; Search Console talks about your pages. The queries that already show your site are what tell you where to work first.
• Excluded searches: Google removes from Trends searches repeated by the same person over a short period and internal searches of its own services, AI Mode and AI Overviews included.
• Time zones: for periods of 30 days or more, dates are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC); for seven days or fewer, in your device’s local time.

For a small business, the right combination comes down to three free tools: Trends to choose the word and the moment, Keyword Planner for the volume, Search Console to measure what the page earns.