Google Trends can be a great tool in any SEO or content marketing professional’s toolkit. With Google Trends, you can discover content opportunities, new and emerging markets in your niche, seasonal trends, and even compare your brand’s performance against your competitors. This guide will explore all these topics and more, with a specific emphasis on how to do this for international markets. Let’s dive in!
Table of contents
- Introduction
- How to use Google Trends
- How to identify international trends
- Discover content opportunities
- Discover new and emerging markets
- Discover seasonal trends
- Monitor your competition
- Monitor your branded search
- Enhance your SEO reporting
- Comparing trends across different countries
- Conclusion
Introduction
Let’s begin by looking at what Google Trends is. Google Trends is a free tool that allows users to browse through Google’s database and find how frequently certain search terms were entered into the search engine over a given period of time.
It is a great tool to identify trending topics and compare popularities internationally across different markets. This can help when you are building an international content marketing plan and choosing topics to create content about in different markets.
How to use Google Trends
There are several ways you can take advantage of the Google Trends platform, depending on what you are looking for. To start exploring this great tool, just insert a search term or topic that you are curious to know the performance of.
However, it is important to know that “search terms” and “topics” have different behaviours and the comparison between them is measured differently.
Google recommends using “topics” whenever possible, as it is more reliable since it includes, besides the exact search term, misspellings and acronyms, and it covers all languages.
However, if you choose to use “search terms”, you can use punctuation as a filter. For example:
- gift card – If you type the search term with no punctuation, this will show results where both words are included, in any order.
- “gift card” – This will include searches with the exact term. Words before and after can be included.
- gift + card – The resulting searches will contain the word gift OR card.
- gift - card – The resulting searches will include the word gift, but exclude the word card.
After inserting the search term or topic, a graphic will be presented showing interest over time. Unlike Keyword Planner, Google Trends uses keyword popularity as a metric, rather than search volume. This popularity will be displayed between 0 to 100. This can be a great help to see if a specific topic is increasing or decreasing in popularity.
This analysis can also be filtered by:
- Location – You can choose to see Worldwide data, or select a specific country, region or city:
- Date range – You can choose any time frame from 2004 to the past hour. You can also customise your own time range:
- Categories – You can explore topics and search terms within a particular context, to get more relevant data to your business and industry:
- Search types – You can refine your search to Web Search, YouTube, Google Shopping, Image Search or News Search.
These filters can be very useful if you want to discover new trends, new markets, new keywords, seasonal trends and more.
Let’s start exploring the multitude of ways you can use Google Trends to identify international trends!
How to identify international trends
One of the many ways Google Trends can be used is by helping you identify international trends. This can be done by analysing search data from various countries and languages, which can help you discover new content opportunities, explore new and emerging markets or look at the seasonality of a trend. In this section, I will take you through each of these scenarios. I will also demonstrate how Google Trends can be used for monitoring your competition and analysing your brand performance across different markets.
Discover content opportunities
Google Trends can be very helpful for discovering new trending topics that could be seen as content opportunities.
This inside information can also be relevant for finding what products or services you should put the effort into optimising, or to discover new keywords.
To do so, start by exploring a search term related to your niche.
For this example, I typed in “dress for women” and searched Worldwide for the past five years.
From the graphic above, you can already tell that this term is showing an upward trend in interest. So, right away, this should be a topic to consider when producing content.
To discover other related content opportunities, scroll down to the “related queries” section.
This section is composed of top and rising searches. To better understand this data, let’s see the main differences between them:
- Top searches – These are the terms most frequently searched in relation to the main search term inserted.
- Rising searches – These are the terms that in relation to the main keyword, experienced the largest growth in volume for the selected time period.
In here, it is also possible to see some results marked as “breakout”. This means this query grew by more than 5,000% when compared to the previous time period. This may mean that these terms are relatively new or had very low search volume before.
Continuing with the example “dress for women”, let’s go ahead and discover some new content opportunities related to this topic.
In the rising searches, you can find more specific searches like “haldi dress for women” and “sexy night dress for women”.
When switching to the top searches, you can see there is also a lot of interest for “black dress for women”.
However, let’s not forget the date range is five years, and you ideally want to produce content on current trends. Let’s compare these terms and see how they are currently performing.
“Black dress for women” has been increasing since 2020 and still has plenty of interest nowadays. However, “sexy night dress for women” recorded some increases in 2020 and 2021 but then experienced a decline until the end of 2024, when interest rose again.
You can also explore the “related topic” section to find other related topics that could be relevant to your business.
In this example, you can see some trending topics that are in line with the related queries, such as the “Diwali festivity”, which could be part of the reason for the increase in “haldi dresses”. Writing about this festivity could be a great content opportunity for your blog, if you happen to have this range of products in your store.
Discover new and emerging markets
Google Trends can also be used to explore new markets, discover the countries, regions or cities most interested in your products, and discover particular trends in each market.
Google Trends provides a global heatmap in the “interest by region” section.
Let’s say you are present in multiple markets and need to determine which market is most relevant for a specific topic. You can enter your preferred topic or search term. For this example, I entered “dress for women”.
You can see that India is the country that has the most interest in this search term.
You can also use this tool to help you optimise your local SEO. Whether you are present internationally, in one country, or only locally, you can play with this feature to see what regions or cities are the most relevant for your business and, from there, see what is trending in your region.
Now, let’s look at another way you can find different trends across different markets.
Insert the target search term or topic into the explorer bar. For this example, I will search the “gluten free diet” topic by Worldwide and look at the data from 2004 until now.
You can see that the term was in an upward trend until the beginning of 2014, and that since then it has remained quite stable, with a slight increase.
Look at the “interest by region” section. Here, you can see that Australia is a big market for this topic, whether you look at a large date range or at more recent data. For example, in the past 30 days:
New Zealand and the US also show a relevant interest in the topic, followed by Canada and the UK.
Refine the search to find actual trending products and content ideas within your most relevant business markets and make use of the comparison feature to do a comparison between them at the same date range.
Scroll down to the “related queries” section for each market and find out what is currently trending.
Australia:
The US:
Canada:
You can see that in Australia, the US and Canada, they all seem to be seeing an increase in searches for “gluten-free sourdough starter”.
So, if you were targeting these markets and researching content for your gluten-free food blog, you should definitely make sure that you include this recipe, as well as these keywords.
On the other hand, New Zealand seems to have more interest in understanding if particular products are gluten-free, like for example:
So, your content targeting New Zealand would need to be different in order to be adapted to these differing interests.
Discover seasonal trends
Understanding the seasonality of your business and when your target audience is most likely to search for a query can be very helpful for your SEO strategy and marketing campaigns.
One of the ways you can use Google Trends is to use the date range filter to identify and discover seasonal searches and annual trends.
For example, when you insert the term “air conditioner” for the US, you can see that, as expected, there is seasonality associated, mainly in the month of July, during the summer.
However, this seasonality differs when you compare it to Australia. There, it is still a seasonal topic, but the peak of interest occurs during December and January – which of course is summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
Make sure you insert a long date range, so you can see any potential seasonality.
Monitor your competition
Google Trends can serve as a monitoring tool for your competition. Monitoring your competition and comparing your brand performance with your main competitors can help you understand your weaknesses and identify which markets are underperforming. This way, you can know where to focus your optimisation efforts.
When you look at Adobe, you can see that in a period of ten years, Adobe went from being above its competitor Canva, to now being less popular, due to a tremendous increase in interest in Canva, especially since 2022.
Past ten years:
This competitor is still in an upward trend and you can see how the worldwide heatmap changed in the last ten years versus the last year.
Past ten years:
Past 12 months:
It seems that all of Latin America is searching more frequently for Canva, rather than Adobe. However, Canva was already more popular in these markets ten years ago. The main changes have been in the US, Canada and several other countries in Europe and Africa.
Monitor your branded search
You can also compare how your branded search is performing across different countries.
For example, as you saw previously, Adobe is not very popular in Latin America, so you can compare the top searches from these markets to North America for example, where the interest is higher, and see the main differences.
In Brazil, you can see that there is actually some relevant interest towards Adobe Reader, as it is present in the top searches. However, this is not the case in the US.
When you compare the topic between these two countries, you can verify that Adobe Reader is slightly more popular in Brazil.
Enhance your SEO reporting
Google Trends can be an excellent tool to support your SEO reporting, especially if you are looking at the organic traffic from Google Search Console.
The trend data can be exported in the “interest over time” graphic and can be overlaid with your actual traffic from Google Search Console.
This can serve as a benchmark and help you to better understand your performance versus how you should be performing, based on the trend estimation from Google Trends.
For example, the graph below shows the interest data for the search term “mdm” over the past 12 months in the US, combined with the Google Search Console clicks data from one of our clients that is ranking for the same query.
This allows you to see if your organic performance is in line with interest trends or if you are underperforming.
Comparing trends across different countries
It is possible to compare up to five search terms.
The comparison feature in Google Trends can be used to support keyword research, to ensure you are targeting the right search term in each target market.
Keyword research
For example, when you compare “memory stick” and “flash drive”, you can see they have different behaviours and popularities across the US and the UK.
Whilst flash drive is more popular in the US, memory stick is the preferred term in the UK, so make sure to target the most popular term in each market.
This can also happen within the same country but in different regions. For example, when you compare “ténis” and “sapatilhas”, two different terms that mean “trainers” in Portuguese, you can see that their popularity varies between the north and south of the country. This can be particularly helpful when optimising your local SEO.
Compare trends
You can also compare trends within a particular market. For example, in Portugal, there are more searches related to renting houses than buying. This can be fundamental information for a real estate agency, allowing them to plan accordingly to their audience’s needs.
As you can see from the heatmap below, “comprar casa” (house for sale) is only more popular in three regions of the country.
You can also take advantage of this feature to compare trends internationally across different markets.
For example, if you have a multi-language blog and are not sure what type of content to translate and publish across your different business markets and languages, Google Trends can help you better understand the ones worth publishing.
One of our clients has an online presence in nine countries. However, English is the official language for the most relevant countries. Before translating and publishing the articles in other languages, it is important to understand which topics are most suitable to be selected for translation, based on the market interest.
For example, if you were to evaluate which language an article from the US blog about “phishing” should be translated into, the priority should be the Netherlands, as this is the country that has the greatest interest in the topic.
Keep in mind that whenever you want to search for international content, if the search is based on search terms and not topics, those search terms should be written in the native language of the target market.
Conclusion
I hope this guide has helped you to understand how to take advantage of Google Trends to identify international trends. Google Trends is a very useful and powerful tool that can help you improve and extend your business, marketing and SEO strategies. It can be used in different ways for different goals. Whether you want to use it to discover content opportunities for your blog or potentially relevant products/services for your business, Google Trends has got you covered. It can also help you to understand how trends behave in different markets and across different time periods. Used well, Google Trends can be a great ally to help you stay up-to-date with the latest search trends and stay ahead of the competition. Good luck!
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