Most keyword-related tools come for a pretty high price, no matter if they are online ones, or specialized programs for your PC/Mac/mobile phone. Fortunately, there’s always some freebie to put the paid ones to shame, and the first one that comes into my mind, at least when talking about keywords, is Google Trends.

When I encountered it for the first time, it was a few years back, with the help of a friend of mine. We were talking about some keyword’s popularity, and he told me to check it on Google Trends. This made me extremely ashamed, simply because I had no idea about it. I became even more ashamed when he told me to go to www.google.com/trends – wasn’t that already obvious?

To make a longer story short, Google Trends helps you find out how popular is a particular search term across various areas, by displaying graphs with the volume of searches since 2004, as well as results broken down by region, city, and language.

Google Trends also comes with some advanced tools, namely Google Insights for Search and Trends for Websites, but we’ll talk about these two in the future. Since using it is as easy as entering one or more keywords (separated by commas, in this case) and pressing the “Search Trends” button in the end, I think there’s one more thing left to mention here, and that is compatibility.

Compatibility: as expected, Google Trends has no problems working with virtually any browser you can think of, since I used it on Opera, Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox, Flock, Safari (the Windows version), Google Chrome, and Avant