How to Use Google's New Top Charts Feature to Improve Your Web Content

BY Eric Siu

As a webmaster, the more you know about your website visitors, the better able you'll be to target future promotions, stock changes, content and more to their needs. Google has a new tool that can help with this.

Conventional keyword research can make it difficult to identify overarching trends within your industry. As an example, suppose you run a website that recommends different credit cards and bank accounts to personal finance readers. You want to know which banking brands are trending among your followers, but when you use your keyword research tool, you get a jumble of results that are hard to interpret.

A keyword list was generated using the search term "bank" within Google Adwords.
SunTrust Banks was represented twice on this list using different spellings. In order to get a complete idea of how many of your readers are interested in SunTrust Banks, you'd need to add all the different SunTrust related keywords together and compare your total against other aggregate options.

This is where Google's new Top Charts feature comes in handy. 
Top Charts provides cumulative trend data in more than 40 categories. Essentially, these charts reveal the subjects that people in a given industry are most interested in based on overall search habits -- not on individual keyword volumes.