One of the best things you can do for improving your e-commerce sales is to focus on trending topics. With a good understanding of what's currently trending, you can plan effective (and even viral) marketing campaigns, deliver exactly what your customers need, get ahead of competitors, and develop products that people really want to buy.

And if you're new to e-commerce or trend research, Google Trends is a good place to start.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a free trend spotting tool that uses data from the Google search engine. The platform shows you metrics related to:

Google search interest
Related queries
Popular search locations
Search interest rate over time

You can access Google Trends via any web browser, and you don't need to sign into your Google account.

Note: Google Trends only looks at data from Google products. If you're looking for trends that are specific to a social media platform, such as TikTok trends, you'll need to use a different tool.

How to Find Relevant Trends with Google

You can use Google Trends for topic discovery in two different ways.

Trending Now

The "trending now" page lets you view all of the trending topics in a specific location or industry over a given time range.

Green line graphs and arrows show the increase or decrease in interest around a trend over the past 24 hours

This is useful when you:

Aren't sure where to begin your research
Want to tap into cultural events in order to expand the reach of your marketing
Want to get an idea of what's trending across your industry

From this page, you can:

View total search volume
See when the trend started to spike in popularity
Explore related trends

Explore

The Google Trends Explore page is the place where you can search for a specific trending topic and narrow the results by:

Location
Time period
Search type (web, image, news, shopping, and YouTube)

A blue line graph shows interest over time for a specific term.

I like to use the explore feature when I have an idea or have heard about a specific topic and want to see if it's broadly popular.

Google's individual trend pages are easy to read. Each page includes a graph of interest fluctuations over a specified time period, related search queries, and related popular topics.

One of the things I like best about Google Trends is how you can directly compare trends by changes in interest over time:

Blue and red line graphs show how two different trends' popularity compares.

5 Ways E-Commerce Businesses Can Use Google Trends

The ability to find trends is great, but you have to know how to use that information in order to make Google Trends data valuable to your business. I find there are five specific ways in which Google Trends can help you grow and optimize an e-commerce business.

1. Find Opportunities with Industry Trend Research

First, Google Trends is a helpful tool for evaluating trends across your industry. You can start broad and narrow down your research further in order to find the right trends for your niche.

Let's say I run a stationery store and I'm interested in selling products for people who journal. I could start by typing in "journaling" and:

Checking to see whether there's any interest in this broad trend
Evaluating what related topics people are searching for such as journaling supplies, journaling tips, and journaling techniques

A declining line graph shows that interest in a topic has previously peaked.

Based on these results, I can see that while interest in journaling as a broad topic is declining, searches for journaling pens are on the rise. I could then explore this subtopic further to identify what brands of pens are most popular with my target audience.

Blue bar graphs and arrows indicate how interest in a trend topic is growing or declining.

Tip: To be sure that the search trend information you gather is relevant to your audience, I recommend using a more comprehensive tool like Exploding Topics. When you search for a trend in the Exploding Topics database, you can see how it performs across all social media channels in addition to organic search.

2. Conduct Competitor and Product Research

In situations where you know you sell a very specific product to a defined audience—such as basketball shoes for athletes—you can use Google Trends to evaluate interest in competing brands.

Multicolored line and bar graphs show the difference in interest around four different brands.

In this case, I can see that Nike is the most popular, followed by Adidas. I could then further research each brand’s trending products along with the digital marketing techniques that they're using. All of this information can then inform my product development, inventory, and promotional decisions.

3. Identify Emerging Regional Trends

Google Trends is also useful for pinpointing where a trend is most popular. This is particularly helpful if your brand sells goods internationally, or if you're planning to expand into a new market.

A blue line graph shows the popularity of a sports term in the U.S.

To explore popularity by location, simply change the location filter on a trend page or view the top "trending now" topics for a region.

A blue line graph shows the popularity of a sports term in Japan.

The ability to view trends by location is also useful if you know a trend typically starts in one location before moving to where your business is located.

Jason Stewart, of Cape Town, South Africa, watches global trend movement in order to plan his marketing strategy. His company, Probitec, sells high-quality, delayed-release probiotic capsules that are unlike anything else on the South African market.

"A lot of trends that are global can be hidden in South Africa until a little bit later," said Stewart. "In an emerging market like our country, we have some time to act on trends."

Stewart finds and monitors future trends by reading the Exploding Topics newsletter each week.

4. Look for Seasonal Trends to Leverage

You can also assess seasonal demand related to specific topics when using Google Trends. Seasonality isn’t clearly labeled by Google, though, so you’ll need to make sure you’re looking at year over year trend patterns to spot repeated peaks and dips.

n upward-trending line graph shows sports interest increased over a twenty-one-year period.

You can set the Google Trends data range to go back to 2004, making it easy to see spikes in search term popularity.

Tip: Use Exploding Topics Pro to make the process of assessing seasonal popularity even easier. Each trend detail page has a list of clearly highlighted key indicators that make it simple to quickly assess a trend’s seasonality, current popularity, consumer sentiment, and more.

5. Choose a New, Profitable Niche

Google Trends can also be a useful tool to check out before you even launch your e-commerce site. By researching emerging trends, you can find the most profitable niche that aligns with your business plan.

For example, planning an e-commerce business around the concept of "fitness" may be far too broad. As a topic, fitness can include everything from at-home workouts to elite athletics.

By looking at the Google Trends page for fitness, I can see that many of the related searches are names of various gym chains.

Blue bar graphs and arrows indicate how interest in a trend topic is growing or declining

As a result, I may want to consider honing my "fitness" niche idea down to more specifically focus on:

Workout books and card decks that are easy to take to the gym
Small, portable items that can enhance a gym workout, like sweat belts and shaker cups
Affordable fitness tracking tech

Can You Use Google Trends to Find SEO Keywords?

A lot of people are curious about how well Google Trends works for finding SEO keywords, and while you can use it as a jumping-off point for your research, it's not my first choice.

Here's why: Google Trends shows you search volume, but it doesn't show you:

What the keyword difficulty score is
If the search results contain any special features
Whether the result triggers an AI overview
What the search intent is

You absolutely need to know what the search intent is and how competitive the keyword is in order to accurately pick SEO keywords for your content strategy development and campaigns. Knowing if an AI overview is present in the search engine results page (SERP) is very important now, too, as people increasingly rely on Google's AI tools to find answers.

To see all of that information, you'll need to use a dedicated keyword research tool in addition to Google Trends.

Tip: Use Google Trends to find popular topics, then use selected trends as seed keywords. Enter these seed keywords into a keyword research tool (like the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool) to find other terms and long-tail keywords that relate to your topic of choice.

The Verdict: Is Google Trends Useful for E-Commerce?

Yes, Google Trends is useful for e-commerce entrepreneurs and marketers who want to get a free, broad overview of:

Search behavior
Trend popularity
Topic seasonality

But Google Trends isn’t the best choice for doing detailed SEO research or getting a better picture of the products that are most popular on Amazon or TikTok. For that you’ll need other tools.

I recommend starting with Exploding Topics. The app’s trend newsletters, free trend lists, and free SEO tools (not to mention the complete trend database for subscribers) will all allow you to gather more relevant information to inform your e-commerce marketing and product development.

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How to Use Google Trends for E-Commerce Growth