Google Trends Guide 2025: How to Use It for Customer Behaviour, Content Marketing, Market Research and SEO
Here at CXA we love Google Trends. We think it is absolutely one of the best free tools on the internet as a wonderful starting point for satisfying curiosity and for validating or mitigating assumption risk.
Google Trends is a free tool from Google that should be celebrated. No other technology giant makes the customer behaviour insights that happen on their platform(s) as freely and openly available as Google does. Without even having an account, or needing any logins or specialist knowledge at all, anyone can look at what customers care about in any country on virtually any topic on Google and YouTube.
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Is it the best tool on the internet for understanding customer behaviour? Honestly, yes, it's definitely one of them. Other tech giants don't give away the same kinds of insights of their users usage anywhere near as freely or easily as Google does.
We also love Google Trends because for curious students, potential business owners and existing business owners it is such an easy tool to be curious with and get answers from.
There are other tools available that provide much more granular detail about that will tell you what customers are looking for and how competitive appearing on Google for those search terms are. These are the kinds of tools we use when conducting deep and comprehensive customer and competitive intelligence to our clients or for our online store.
But for the casually curious or people looking for answers for free the tools that provide more granular detail have some pretty significant restrictions. Now, fair enough, there are costs to be paid to run these other platforms, but for bang for buck, at zero dollars and unlimited usage, Google Trends, even in 2025 continues to be a tool that is hard to look past.
So, how do you use Google Trends for basic analysis? How can it help you find what customers want to know more about or potentially buy. Well, this free guide - which just like Google Trends doesn't need any logins or details to be exchanged - will show you everything you can do with Google Trends. We will also share some tips for how you can use it to discover things you knew you wanted to know, and maybe even discover valuable insights into what you didn't know you didn't know, about your industry, your customers and even your competitors.
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How to Use Google Trends for Basic Analysis
For the purposes of this guide, we are going to use Google Trends as if we are doing some research for a friend based in Australia who wants to start a sports related ecommerce website.
Access Google Trends: Navigate to the Google Trends website. and you will be presented with a series of examples of what's trending in your country, and other countries, right now.
Enter a Search Term: Enter one or more words that you want to know more about. The way to think about this is 'what would I search on Google if I wanted [x] thing?' because that's what Google Trends is going to show you - the level of interest on the word(s) people are putting in to Google, themselves.
In our example we've chosen 'AFL' (that's Australian Rules Football for anyone reading this who isn't Australian). We've decided to start with AFL because while we know it is a big sport in Australia we want to be able to tell our friend three important things about interest in AFL on Google:
- Trends - What is the trend in AFL interest on Google? Is it steady, growing or declining?
- Compare - How does AFL interest compare to other Australian and American sports?
- What else should we know? - What are the sorts of things we might not obviously think about that would be useful for our friend to consider before launching their website?
Analyse Interest Over Time and Use Filters
Review the overview graph Google Trends displays of the popularity of the search term(s) (also know as keywords) you've inputted, over time. You can change the time range from a few hours to more than 20 years and even customised ranges.
The interest score ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 indicating peak popularity for the search term(s) (keyword), you've entered.
The interest range is not a volume of searches for the search term(s) you've entered. It is a relative scale, that doesn't tell you how many searches there are for the search term for the period of time you've selected, but you it is still a good indication of demand for something, particularly when compared to something else (we cover comparison in more detail, below).
In the example for the AFL, we can see that, as expected, interest runs highest during the AFL season, and interest was broadly similar in 2023 and 2024, with some slight variations. The 2025 season, which is start now at the time of writing, looks like it's off to a very strong start.
Explore Additional Data and Download Data
Interest by Subregion - Identifies which geographic areas show the most interest in your keyword.
Download Data - If you want to use the data in reports, or add it to other analysis a download button is available which will export the data to .csv or Google Sheets.
Comparing Multiple Terms
The "Compare" option allows you to add up to 5 terms in total, which are handily pre-sorted into distinctly different colours to make comparison easy. This feature enables you to analyse the relative popularity of multiple search terms (aka keywords) simultaneously.
Related Topics and Queries
These two sections provide insights into broader or more niche subjects related to your keyword. For the most up to date information we recommend adjusting the time period to the past 7 - 30 days.
5 Ways to Leverage Google Trends for Marketing, Content Plans and SEO
Planning. Identifying valuable search queries relevant to your business is one thing. Knowing when interest in them ramps up and down is another. For example, if you have our free marketing guide, which includes an omnichannel campaign planning timing calendar you can plan your marketing year (image below).
This planning is really helpful not only for when big external events happen - such as Black Friday or Afterpay Day - but also for knowing when customers are active and looking for the products and services you sell inside and outside of major sales campaign periods.
Importantly you can plan backwards from those key points in time to property plan out a marketing program of work so you and the team know when you need to be kicking off work and briefing your marketing and digital marketing agency for maximum campaign impact.
Build Interlinked Topic 'Clusters' to Demonstrate Expertise. Google's algorithm loves it when websites demonstrate their deep expertise in a particular area. As we highglihted recently, all of Google's SEO Algorithm updates over the last decade have been focused on one objective: authenticity and expertise to deliver an optimal customer experience.
Organising your site content around main themes with related subtopics branching off each central pillar is, first and foremost a great customer experience, and therefore a great experience for algorithms.
Using our AFL example, we could recommend to our friend . For instance, a running shoe company might have a pillar topic like "marathon training," with subtopics identified through the "Related topics" and "Related queries" sections.
Video and Podcast Content - By leveraging the Related Topics and Queries, and setting it to the last 24 hours - 7 days you will know what is top of mind for people interersted in the topic you're reasearching. For example, using the information below, we would advise our friend to create content across a blog, social media, and a shorts based podcast to provide a unique and valuble perspective on Luke Cleary, Sam Lalor Murphy Reid and the Richmond Football Club.
Identifying Seasonal Trends - for sports, trends are quite pronounced as there are predictable, repeating starts and ends to seasons, as well as trade deadlines. But for other topics there can be more subtle, multi-staged trends that can appear. Below you can see the spiking trend of people searching for various white and brown goods. These insights could be valuable for marketers, sales teams, pricing teams even finance teams all sorts of businesses such as retailers, wholesalers, banks and credit card companies, energy companies, insurance companies and more. Leveraging these behaviours could be a game-changer for planning when to be in market, and may leave customers pleasently surprised, thinking 'how did they know? I haven't told anyone, but this promotion is helpful...'
Understand Regional Interests: Google Trends is also useful for understanding current demand for a particular topic by region. How this information is interpreted by your business is up to you - you may see it is as blue ocean for your company to market and grow in that market or you may want to keep away from it entirely.
The Final Word
Google Trends is undoubtedly a very powerful tool that is all the more remarkable due to being free and unrestricted to use. In our view it remains one of the most powerful online research tools available as a way to confirm or invalidate assumptions, and as a starting point for further research with tools such as SEMRush and ahrefs or with your digital marketing agency and team.
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