Google Trends: Predict The Future of Your Business

Author: Conrad Salvador
Writer Coordinator

So you’ve done all that you can for your online business in your targeted markets and now you are looking to expand to other territories. How can you predict what will be the hot “new” thing? What markets would you like to target now? How can I find out where my product will make an impact internationally? If you had the insight to predict what to do in the future for your business, wouldn’t you like to know how?

The newest version of Google Trends went live yesterday with some features that will be beneficial for you to answer all of the previous questions. That’s good and all, but how can you predict what will be the “hot” new thing or the future?

Well, here’s an example of what is currently going on with Google Trends (we captured this image just minutes ago). As we can see by the example below in Today’s Hot Trends that “email french” is the top searched keyword for 6/11/08.

After a little investigation, I found out that the French Government is looking to get rid of the word “e-mail” in all government ministries, documents, publications, and websites. The move was motivated because the French want to exclude English words out of the French lexicon.

In the SEO world, this is valuable information if you were thinking about doing some work in France. You would have to adjust your SEO marketing plan to correlate with what is going on over there currently and down the road as well.

Another way Google Trends can be useful for your business is that it enables you to better target main keywords for your market. For this example we will use the keyword “houston real estate“. I chose this example, because it is no mystery that the real estate industry is not doing too good and by utilizing Google Trends, you can see where the drop-off occurred by year and you can also see which region is currently looking for that keyword. If this was the keyword you were targeting, then you can see by the example below that Humble, TX is the market you should now focus on due to the popularity of that keyword:

Now that you’ve made your mark in America, you are now thinking about expanding your business overseas. For this example you will have to change the keyword search to make it more relevant, in this case we will generalize the term to “real estate“. All you have to do is change the region dropdown list to ALL REGIONS and you can see which countries are searching for this term the most. As you can see by the example below that this term is being searched for the most in Australia, which translates to a stronger real estate market in this country:

With Google Trends, you can have a crystal ball when it comes to what you should do with your online business. You can see what you need to do now based on the latest trends online. Google’s newest tool can also enhance your business research experience, allowing marketers to monitor trends home and abroad. With Google Trends and a little bit of inventive SEO marketing, you can now control your own future.