How-to Track Global Search Trends

By Matt Mickiewicz | March 22, 2006 | SEO and SEM

Google is now providing trendinig data for every keyword in their database.

Try this:
1. Visit the keyword tool
2. Enter a keyword such as “PHP”
3. From the drop-down menu select

Voila!

Google will show a bar shart that shows the total search volume by month, as well as the months in which the search volume is the highest.

Matt Mickiewicz

Matt is the co-founder of SitePoint and 99designs and Flippa. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

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{ 16 comments }

Franky17 June 14, 2008 at 5:29 am: Now that overture has been taken down :( why would they do that, you can use wordtracker search tool
Palcom Web June 12, 2008 at 9:46 pm: Search engine optimization is a time taking and tricky business. It requires a lot of effort and hard work to rank in top. But the key phrases used to rank well on one search engine may totally fail or be less effective to rank on other search engines. Well all the majorly known search engines differ from each other in some form or the other. It is for this reason that some people create web pages for a particular search engines while the rest of the pages are created for other search engines. Usually a slight difference is present in these pages. So when indexing takes place the search engine crawlers might find the slightest difference and mark them as spam. To overcome these difficulties a robot.txt file is created which is a simple txt or word pad file that is uploaded in the root folder of your site.
Write the following
User-Agent: (Spider Name)
Disallow: (File Name)
To disallow all engines from indexing a file you simply use the * character where the engines name would usually be. However beware that the * character won’t work on the Disallow line. Palcomonline.com
webhosting.uk.com November 29, 2006 at 10:41 pm: Indeed a very nice tool.
Nice post and very helpful too. Thanks for sharing with us.
Anonymous September 22, 2006 at 8:14 pm: Very interesting tool and stats! But it would have been much better if they could have provided the actual figures alongwith the graphics. Nevertheless a very useful tool.
zia June 17, 2006 at 3:28 pm: good stats!!!
but very confusing
jnoneiliv1 April 17, 2006 at 9:23 pm: Oops, the keyword list is as long as there are relevant phrases. I just found a keyword phrase in my industry with very little Advertiser Competition but relatively high search popularity that does not appear in the free overture keyword popularity list.
Cool.
jnoneiliv1 April 17, 2006 at 9:15 pm: Interesting, not quite the absolute measurement hinted by Matt’s choice of the words “total search volume”, but very good proportional measurements.
You can see the relative popularity of each keyword compared to each other as measured proportionaly, and the 12 month trend as each month is plotted against the rolling 12 month average.
A little more obscure to interpret, but you can also see Advertiser Competition shown graphicaly.
If you download to the CSV file the graphs are represented numericaly either as percent or some proportional measurement. Too bad the scale for the baseline for each set of keywords would not be the same accross several batches of 8.
Steve March 29, 2006 at 12:55 am: If you can’t log in, there’s a screenshot here. Very cool.
Davina March 26, 2006 at 2:17 pm: And the point of this is, how does it help, is the list in an order? How many times have those been searched? Rubbish
whoever March 25, 2006 at 2:34 am: It shows No Data but graphic
Matt Mickiewicz March 23, 2006 at 7:03 pm: I don’t think you need an AdWords account because there’s a button on the right hand side that says “Sign up With These KeyWords”.
You just have to type in a keyword, click “Get more keywords” and then use the drop down menu to select and select “global search volume trends”.
Gamermk March 23, 2006 at 11:46 am: Yes, I also have no idea how to get past the selection of keywords. If I sign up for a 0 dollar spending limit then will I get to see the data? What if I just put in like 5 bucks and let it run out?
A little more information would be greatly appreciated.
craig34 March 23, 2006 at 9:07 am: Do you have to be an AdWords member to see this? I’m having a hard time getting past the step where I select keywords…
peach March 23, 2006 at 4:09 am: too bad it’s not giving any cost and position estimatets yet.
Matthew Magain March 23, 2006 at 1:38 am: Hmm, useful info. Terrible interface though. The dropdown doesn’t appear unless you select the “Get More Keywords” button first, and is positioned over to the right whilst the estimates then appears to the left. Confusing!
weirdmonkey March 23, 2006 at 1:16 am: Great!
(too bad it does not give you the exact number of search per month)