Tool: Google Trends

If you ever need to add keywords into your writing - which could easily happen either in Web corporate work or when writing editorial headlines that you want to grab attention - it helps to know how well a search term does. That's why you should check out Google Trends. It doesn't work for all terms, as it filters out anything that gets less activity than some secret threshold measure of popularity. But you can take a term and see both the search volume index (a relative measure of demand) and an index for how often the term is used in searching news items.

Check this example of trends for the search term chocolate. Not only are there graphs of the ebb and flow of user interest, but it marks some points by given news stories, so you might have a sense of why there was a sudden spike at one point. (It's imprecise, however, so there may be no story link to a given rush of interest.) Then you can see relative strengths in different countries, cities, and even languages.

Plus, you can actually compare the relative strengths of different search terms, so you can see which ones you might use, or not. Here's an example of searching on chocolate, cocoa, and carob. Also notice that you can restrict the examination to searches originating from a given country or that happened during a specific year.