# How to Use Google Trends to Find What to Write About (Free, No SEO Skills) > A free, no-login walkthrough of Google Trends for owners who want blog and product ideas. Type a term, read the rising panel, and turn a phrase into a title customers actually search. *Roald, Founder Fonzy · Jul 10, 2026 · 8 min read* Source: https://www.fonzy.ai/blog/how-to-use-google-trends --- **Short answer:** Google Trends is a free Google tool at trends.google.com that shows whether interest in a topic is rising, falling, or seasonal. Type a word a customer would search, read the 0-100 line and the "Rising" related queries, and you write what people are looking for right now instead of guessing. Picture a neighborhood bakery. The owner wants a blog post that pulls people in from Google, but she has no idea what to write. She could guess. Or she could spend ten minutes in a free tool that tells her what her neighbors are typing into Google this month. That tool is Google Trends, and you do not need an account, a card, or a single SEO term to use it. Google launched it in 2006 as a free tool for the general public, and the data behind it stretches back to 2004, according to Shopify's guide for small businesses. Here is the whole process, in order. ## Step 1: Open the free tool and type in one term Go to trends.google.com. There is no sign-up wall and nothing to pay. You land on a single search box. Type one word or short phrase a customer would actually use, then press enter. For the bakery, that word is "sourdough." Not "artisanal fermented bread products." The word your customer would type. Start broad and plain. You can narrow later. The whole point of this first step is to get one real search term on the screen so the tool has something to chart. ## Step 2: Read the "Interest over time" line correctly The first thing you see is a wavy line labeled "Interest over time," scored from 0 to 100. This is the single most misunderstood number on the page, so read this twice: the 100 is not 100 searches. It is relative popularity. Google normalizes the data. Each data point is divided by the total searches for that place and time, then scaled to 0-100 based on the topic's share of all searches, per Google's own Trends Help. So 100 marks the most popular moment in your chosen window, and every other point is measured against it. A reading of 50 means "half as popular as the peak," not "fifty searches." A flat line at zero usually means the term is just too small to chart; Google only shows data for popular terms, and low-volume searches appear as "0." Why this matters for the bakery: you are reading the shape of the line, not a sales figure. Is interest climbing? Falling? Spiking every December? The shape is the signal. ## Step 3: Set your time window and location By default Trends often shows the past year, worldwide. A neighborhood bakery does not sell to the world. Fix that with two dropdowns at the top. Set the location to your country, then drill down. You can narrow from worldwide to the US, then to a state, then to a metro area, as Shopify lays out. Pick California and you see volume sorted by metro within the state. That is the difference between national noise and the demand on your street. Then set the time window. Leave it at 12 months for a quick read of right now. You will widen it in Step 6 to spot seasons. For now, country plus a recent window gives you a clean picture of what people near you are searching lately. If you want to find the longer, more specific phrases customers use, this local view is where they start to surface. ## Step 4: Scroll to "Related queries" and learn Top vs Rising Scroll down past the map. You reach "Related queries," and it splits into two tabs that do completely different jobs. Most beginners glance at one and miss the better one. Top searches are the terms most frequently searched alongside the one you entered, per Google's Trends Help. These are your evergreen, dependable ideas. For the bakery: "sourdough starter," "sourdough recipe." Steady demand you can count on. Rising searches are the terms that grew the most in volume during your chosen window. This is the panel that earns its keep. It surfaces what is heating up right now, before your competitors notice. Simon Cox, co-founding director of Wildings Studio, a small web and branding studio in Devon, UK, uses exactly this split in his own blog workflow. He searches a broad term like "garden design" over the past 12 months, then reads Top and Rising. Top, he says, lets you "rank ideas and avoid pursuing a one-off trend," while Rising tends to surface seasonal queries that "crop again in future," which makes them more evergreen and worth writing about. Top tells you what is safe. Rising tells you what is next. In our own work picking topics for owner-run shops, the Rising panel is the part that consistently earns its place. It keeps surfacing a specific, seasonal question the owner would never have guessed on their own, the kind of phrase you only learn by watching real searches climb rather than brainstorming in a room. That is the whole reason to open the tool instead of guessing. ## Step 5: Spot a "Breakout" query Sometimes a Rising query shows the word "Breakout" instead of a percentage. Stop and look at that one. "Breakout" means the search term grew by more than 5,000%, according to Google's Trends Help. That is usually a brand-new phrase, a fresh trend, or a question that just took off. For the bakery, a breakout might be a viral technique or a new flavor people suddenly want. These are the topics worth grabbing first, because the article that answers a breakout question early often has the field to itself. Competitors are still guessing. You already saw it. A word of caution: a breakout can be a one-week flash or the start of something lasting. Cross-check it against Step 6 before you build a whole calendar around it. ## Step 6: Read seasonality to build a content calendar Now widen the time window. Switch from 12 months to 5 years. The line stops being a single wave and starts showing a pattern that repeats. Google Trends is genuinely useful for planning a content calendar, Shopify notes, because historical data lets you see when interest in a topic peaks each year and predict the next peak. For the bakery, "sourdough" might climb every January as resolution bakers start, or "birthday cake" might spike before summer. Once you see the repeating shape, you plan backward. Publish a few weeks ahead of the spike so your post is already ranking when the search wave arrives. This is how a handful of search terms becomes a year of posts. If you want a structure to drop these into, here are more [content marketing ideas](/blog/content-marketing-ideas) to build around the peaks you find. The principle is plain: write for the season before the season starts. ## Step 7: Compare two terms to pick the better headline word You will often have two ways to say the same thing. Trends settles the argument. Add a second term with the "Compare" button and put both lines on one chart. The bakery wonders: do people search "birthday cake" or "celebration cake"? Type both. Whichever line sits higher is the phrase your customers actually use, so that is the word that belongs in your headline and on your page. This is a fast way to [see the exact words your customers and competitors use](/blog/find-content-ideas-customers-competitors) without any paid tool. You are not picking the phrase you like. You are picking the one they type. ## Step 8: Turn the term into a real blog title, then publish Here is the honest limit of Trends, and Cox names it plainly: you do not get answers on a plate. The tool hands you short two-word phrases, not finished blog titles, and getting value out of it is an iterative process of going down a few rabbit holes. So the last step is yours. Start with your phrase, say "sourdough starter," and shape it into a real question or headline. The fastest helper is free and already in Google: search your phrase, then read the "People also ask" box. Cox cross-references that same box to build full headlines. "Sourdough starter" becomes "How to Keep a Sourdough Starter Alive (Beginner's Guide)." A phrase becomes a title a person would click. Then write it and put it live. If you want a walkthrough from blank page to published, here is [how to write a blog post step by step](/blog/how-to-write-a-blog-post). Trends only works once the post exists, and [consistent blogging does move your search visibility](/blog/does-blogging-help-seo) over time. The tool finds the topic. You still have to publish the answer. ## Frequently asked questions ### Is Google Trends really free? Yes. Google launched it in 2006 as a free tool for the general public, and it remains free today, per Shopify. There is no account required, no card, and no paid tier gating the features in this guide. You open trends.google.com and start typing. ### What does the 0 to 100 number actually mean? It is relative popularity, not a count of searches. Google divides each data point by total searches for that place and time, then scales it 0-100 based on the topic's share of all searches, according to Google's Trends Help. So 100 is the most popular moment in your window, and 50 is half as popular as that peak. It is never "50 searches." ### What is the difference between Top and Rising queries? Top queries are the terms most frequently searched alongside yours, your steady evergreen ideas. Rising queries are the ones that grew the most in your chosen window, so they show what is heating up now. Google's Trends Help defines both this way. Write Top for dependable traffic, and watch Rising for what is next. ### What does "Breakout" mean in the Rising panel? It means that search term grew by more than 5,000%, per Google's Trends Help, so Trends shows the word instead of a normal percentage. A breakout is usually a brand-new or fast-trending phrase. Check it against the 5-year view to tell a lasting shift from a one-week flash before you build content around it. The bakery owner started with one word and a guess. Ten minutes later she has a year of post ideas, the exact phrase her neighbors type, and a calendar built around the months they search. That is the whole job of Google Trends: it turns "I don't know what to write" into "I know what people want this month." Fonzy does this reading for you and writes the posts that match it, so the part you skip is the part you were never going to enjoy anyway. If you want more starting points, here are [more ways to find content ideas your customers are searching for](/blog/content-ideas). ## Sources - [Google Trends Help, FAQ about Google Trends data: explains that the 0-100 score is relative popularity, normalized and scaled, and that low-volume terms show as 0](https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4365533?hl=en) - [Google Trends Help, Find related searches: defines Top vs Rising queries and the "Breakout" >5,000% growth label](https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4355000?hl=en) - [Shopify, How Small Businesses Can Use Google Trends: free tool launched 2006 with data back to 2004, location drill-down, and seasonal content-calendar planning](https://www.shopify.com/blog/trends-google) - [Wildings Studio (Simon Cox), Google Trends is not for ideas, it's for search demand: real owner workflow using Top vs Rising and People Also Ask to build titles](https://www.wildings.studio/blog/google-trends-what-people-searching-online) --- Published by [Fonzy](https://www.fonzy.ai) — expert articles that get you found on Google and AI search.