What is difference between google trends topic vs search term?
There was a recent discussion with one of my colleague on “What is the difference between Google trends topic vs Search term in Search Console?”
Can we use Google Trends data to predict the overall demand of a particular brand or product?
Google Trends is not Monthly Search Volume, but growth rate helps us detect the emerging trends of terms is a good use.
- Topics are entities in Google Trends.
- Everything is not a “search term” in Google Trends is an entity type, and in an unencoded version of the URL is the MID (machine ID) for that Entity type.
This is when Google has recognized a searcher was searching using a query with an entity in it.
That triggers an augmented search result that includes a knowledge panel and other knowledge type results, such as featured Snippets, and people also ask questions.
You can find out more about the Entity showing in that search result and facts or attributes about the entity.
That information may be on the page or in the schema for the page.
You can find related Entities by using the NLP API tool from Google or looking the entity up in Google image search and looking at the category labels for the image results.
Knowing what is related to entities can be helpful when creating content for a page about a specific entity.
I personally use “Trends” to watch out for shifting Patterns and seasonality of product, brand, dialect or even naming conventions, and you can get this at a granular level up to country, metro and city level to see if the use of terms varied by City vs “country” (it can!)
I also use trends to diagnose dwindling Organic Search traffic while Google Search Console reports average positions high but clicks low, and GA says traffic is going down south.
I’ll check at least head terms for the downward Trends. There is no sense in flogging a dying keyword.
If a primary keyword is declining long-term in Trends, it becomes important to assess whether fickle word use is at fault (what’s the new term?) or perhaps the product or service category is falling into disfavour.
A good marketer will be adroit enough to shift focus and even talk to the respective teams to change the offerings rather than ride a “downbound train.”
Here’s my recent post on How do I find the best keywords for SEO?