Google trends was one of the more interesting tools that helped estimate the popularity of a search term. However, users were often left frustrated by the lack of any numbers whatsoever on the Y axis. That meant that one had to visually guess the relative popularity of a search phrase vis-à-vis another one. Not too usefule for a search engine optimization consultant!

Now, at last, Google has introduced a Y axis value. While the axis still doesn’t give us the absolute number of searches for a particular term, it scales the first term entered so that its average search traffic in the chosen time period is 1 and then gives us the relative popularity of the subsequent search terms.

I entered mobile phones and cell phones as my 2 search terms and set the period to last 12 months and Geo to All regions, Google trends gave me a figure of 1 for mobile phones and 1.20 for cell phones. This means that for every 5 searches of mobile phones over the last 12 months, there were 6 searches for cell phones. Interesting. Now, if I have a site ranking at the top of Google for one of these terms I can easily and accurately estimate the number of hits I can get for the other term as well. Much better than using just third party tools for keyword analysis, isn’t it?