Google Trends: seeing what people really search for
Google Trends shows, free of charge, how interest in a word rises, compares and spreads across cantons. What it tells you, what it doesn't, and how to use it before you write. Tools series, part one.
The series for non-specialists explained how Google discovers, understands and ranks your pages. This series takes the other end: the tools, all free, that show you what the engine sees and what people type. We start with the easiest one to reach, Google Trends, which doesn’t even ask for an account.
What the tool shows
Trends displays how interest in a search term evolves over time, in the geographic area of your choice. Type a word, narrow it to Switzerland, pick a period: the curve that appears tells you when that word gets searched, whether it is rising or fading, and whether it follows a season. A heating installer will see that “heat pump” peaks in autumn; a florist, that everything is decided in the three days before each holiday.
Two features are worth the detour. Comparison, first: up to five terms on the same chart, which settles in ten seconds the question “should I write renovation or conversion?” by showing which of the two words people actually use. Regional breakdown, next: interest by canton, precious when you serve a local clientele and hesitate between two ways of naming your trade depending on the region.
What the numbers mean, and don’t mean
The point everyone gets wrong: Trends does not display search volumes. The official documentation is explicit: the data is normalized, that is, divided by the total searches of the place and period, then put on a scale from 0 to 100 where 100 marks the peak of interest. A score of 50 therefore doesn’t mean “half as many searches as a word at 100 in absolute terms”; it means “half as much as that curve’s own peak”. The tool compares proportions, never quantities.
Another honest limit: on rare terms, or in an area as small as a canton, the data gets thin and the curve erratic. A flat line at zero doesn’t prove that nobody searches for your trade; it proves that the volume falls below the threshold Trends is willing to display. Widen the area or the period before drawing conclusions.
How to use it before writing
The profitable use comes upstream of the writing, when choosing the words for a page, what the part “Writing to be found” called speaking the customer’s language. Three moves are enough. Compare the synonyms for your offer and keep the one people type. Look at the seasonality and publish before the peak, not during it: a page put online in October for an October topic arrives after the battle, because indexing and then ranking take weeks. Finally, glance at the “related queries” at the bottom of the page: Trends lists what the same people also search for, and there are often two or three article ideas in there you would not have had on your own.
Next part: even simpler than Trends, the search bar itself, whose autocomplete whispers your customers’ questions to you for free.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.