Whenever you’re choosing new keywords for a client’s business or your own business, you obviously want all the information possible on the phrases you’re considering. So just to make a single selection you’re probably looking at monthly volume, keyword difficulty, paid competition, doing manual SERP checks and looking at your site’s analytics to see how that keyword has been performing in the past. One other tactic you can add to your keyword research arsenal, however, is to analyze a keywords’ seasonality by looking at its monthly search trends.
A keyword trend graph can help you do just that. And, they’re incredibly easy to build. Here’s how you can set one up.
Head to your Adwords Keyword Planner (RIP Google Keyword Tool) and search for all of the keywords that you’d like included in your trend graph. You can also build separate graphs for each keyword. For the sake of brevity, I would try to limit your keywords to your head category terms; the ones that are your real money makers. Since this is an example and the NFL season is finally here, I chose to do a keyword trend graph of all the teams in the NFC North. 
Hmm, looks like my Bears already have a strong lead in terms of popularity. Once you’ve searched for your terms, click the arrows at the end of each row to add the keywords to your ad group. Once you have all of your keywords added, you can download your selections by clicking on the down arrow icon above the review estimates button on the right-hand side. After you click download, make sure that you have both “historical data” and “segment by month” checked in the dialogue box that pops up.
When you open the CSV file, you’ll find that the volume data for each keyword has been separated month by month, going back to the same month of last year. Note, however, that your data will be missing your current month. One solution for that is to use the current average monthly search volume in lieu of the missing month. Though I feel that depending on how far you are into the month will cause that number to vary.
Once you have the CSV you can delete the following columns:
- Ad Group
- Keyword Type
- Currency
- Avg. CPC
- Impressions Share
If you don’t want to use average monthly search volume, you can delete that column too. At the end, all you’ll have left is your keywords and their search volume separated by month. It’s advisable that you remove the word “Searches:” from the beginning of each month so that you’re axis labels don’t look funky when you create your trend graphs in Excel. You can do that with a quick find and replace.
After you cleanup your data, you should have a solid table with month-by-month search volume for each of your keywords.
There’s really nothing to it after that. All you have to do is take all of your data and plot it into a line graph. This will give you a visual representation of how each keyword has performed over the course of a year. Using this graph, you can determine where certain keywords have dips or high points and whether or not they’re on an upwards or downwards trajectory. My keyword trends in this graph are fairly similar because searches for all NFL teams tend to pick up when the season starts (early September) and drop off when there is no football (February through August). However, yours will likely give you a better idea into the difference in search trends for your target keywords. 
Closing Thoughts
Where real value comes in here is to continue recording keyword trend data as the months go by. Each month you’ll be able to add onto the search volume these keywords receive and eventually you’ll be able to construct trend lines and predictions about where they’re headed in the future. This will come in very handy whenever you’re refreshing a client’s keyword strategy or trying to make a case for or against a specific keyword.
