Google Trends: A Useful Writer's Tool

Do you love to write but sometimes have trouble finding a topic to write about? If Associated Content's Calls for Content (TM) don't interest you, but you still want to pick a subject that will generate hits, try checking out Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).

Google Trends (officially called "Google Trends Labs") specializes in the popularity of search terms. It enables you to see how often a particular topic has been "Googled" over the past five years, and how often it has appeared in Google News stories.

A writer looking for a topic will find the "Today's Hot Trends" section to be a goldmine of information. It lists the day's most popular search terms.

If you're like me and don't always know what a particular search term is referring to--like today's (May 28) most-searched topic: "Sarah Larson"--you can click the keywords to find out more. Up pops a page with all sorts of useful information including how "hot" the topic is (Sarah Larson is "on fire"), related search terms (George Clooney and Talia Balsam are two), when the search term peaked in popularity (four hours ago), a graph showing how interest developed in the topic throughout the day, and a list of news stories and blog posts about the keywords.

I glanced at one of the news stories and quickly discovered that Sarah Larson is an ex-girlfriend of George Clooney's who recently got dumped. This points up one of the benefits of using Google Trends: you can learn all sorts of new things (even if it's just gossip).

I used Google Trends once to find a topic to write about and it served me well. It was December 21, 2007, and I had just heard about the site, so I was dying to test my theory that picking topics from Google Trends would get me lots of hits.

On that particular day several of the top-ten search terms were related; three were: "blue man," "colloidal silver" and "argyria." I had no idea what these referred to, so I spent some time doing research and found that they all came from a news story about Paul Karason, from Oregon, who used colloidal silver as a topical solution to cure severe dermatitis, and who developed argyria as a result--a condition whereby the skin turns blue.

I read several more news stories, compiled them, then wrote a piece entitled Alternative Medicine Turns Man's Skin Blue. How has this story done in terms of hits? Of the 44 articles I've published on AC to date, this one is the seventh most popular, and it was one of the easiest to write. It continues to get hits even today.

One note: If you do use this method to create content, please don't be a hack and churn out something that simply reiterates what everyone else has written on the subject. Add something new, or look at it from a different angle (from your own point of view, for example.)

One thing I did with my alternative medicine piece was check the National Institutes of Health Web site and read up on colloidal silver. I added a section detailing the dangers of using it as a cure. This is something I hadn't found in any of the other articles I'd read on Paul Karason's experience.

Selecting Keywords

Another way Google Trends can be useful is in helping you select keywords for your articles. You usually only get to have five, so it's important to use five popular search terms.

If you have more than five keywords to choose from, use Google Trends to figure out which of these are the most popular. You do this by inputing them in the "Search Trends" field on Google Trends' home page, separated by commas.

For example, I recently wrote an article on investing and market timing. I wanted to know which keywords were searched more often: "market timing" or "timing the market," so I input them thusly: "market timing, timing the market." I'm glad I did so, because "timing the market" was hardly popular at all, compared to "market timing."

You can compare more than two keywords at a time. I just input: "invest, investing, stocks, stock market." The most popular: "stocks."