You don’t need a bunch of paid fancy tools to do basic keyword research for your website or blog. Google Trends is a great introductory keyword research tool for any business owner that is producing and posting their own content.

 
When you’re creating a blog post, you want to make sure the terms you are using match the terms that people are searching for. Since sometimes you can present yourself using a number of different terms, it’s a good idea to use a keyword research tool. For example, when we became HubSpot certified partners, we thought about changing the wording on our home page from “Digital Marketing Agency” to “Inbound Marketing Agency.”
 
Within Google trends, we went to the Explore Tool. Here is what we found:
 

 
While the Explore Tool doesn’t give us hard number as to how many people searched for these terms, it can push us in one way or the other when we can’t decide which term to use. In this case, the clear winner is “digital marketing agency,” so we kept our main page titles as they were.
 
The “inbound marketing agency” traffic is growing and it’s not a term we will ignore, we just will focus on it with our blog content rather than the home page of our website.
 
The tool also points out major news headlines that could have contributed to a rise in traffic for that term. Other interesting features are how much regional interest there are in those terms and what some related search terms are.
 
Google trends can also just be used if you’re curious about what people are searching for. It gives real time information about the top searches. It’s pretty easy to get lost down the rabbit hole when using this tool, so be careful of that if you’re on work time.