Let me first start by saying Google Trends is not a keyword search volume tool. It shows you the general trend, and is relative only to that search phrase.

I have found it particularly useful when researching niches, for example, say you wanted to use Rayzz to start your own video sharing site in the niche of Base Jumping (hey, there’s a lot of crazy people out there), I can use Google Trends to find out if it’s a growing niche based on searches.

Based on the image above, we can see that the overall trend for base jumping seems to be up, great news if we were to start a new site on base jumping.

Some of the limitations of the tool is that it won’t report on every keyword if there is not enough data. So you can probably forget about using most of your long tail words in this tool.

What I find the tool useful for is to search for the higher level or more generic keywords and see what the overall trend is for the niche in general. If it’s a rising trend, then it’s a good sign it’s a growing industry.

Let’s say you were looking at Orbit Social Networking Software, you are wondering if social networking is a growing industry. We head over to Google Trends and do a search…

Awesome! The search has near exponential growth, social networking is definitely taking off. And look at the number of news reports, social networking is a hot topic right now, so it’s definitely time to hop on that band wagon