Keeping up to date with what people search for online can be invaluable to your business. Whether you’re looking to inform your latest paid search campaign or just need some fresh, trending content for your blog, these tools can help.
However, with over 3.5 billion searches[1] each day worldwide, it’s hard to know how to narrow all that data down to help you improve your SEO.
Here are some of the many great tools available to help you discover what people search for: the most popular topics, keywords, and trending stories.
Google Trends[2]
When asking what people search for, it makes sense to start with the largest, most commonly used search engine in the world – Google. Due to its sheer size, Google has some great stats, trends, and insights to dig your teeth into.
Let’s look at Google Trends, for example. This gives you a very quick overview of the searches with the most traffic overall, which is continually updated. You can enter a keyword and see how search volume has varied for that term over time and in different places.
Simply change the location, time frame, category and type of search to dig even deeper into the data.
Google Trend results for “SEO.”
Google Autocomplete
If you’re looking to find variations in your keyword phrases, Google Autocomplete is a great free tool that you’re probably already using every day.
Type your keyword into the search box and related terms will display in a drop down list. This can be a good starting point for inspiration on long-tail keywords you might need.
Google News[3]
If you’re looking for fresh content for a