While Google Trends is traditionally thought of as a tool for search engine marketers, it has some great applications for spotting market trends. It’s a great tool that senior executives and CEOs can even use to get some perspective on high-level trends in 30 seconds or less.

Simply type in a few terms, and it quickly displays a chart of the relative search volumes of those terms, allowing you to see how the terms compare to each other, and how they have been trending over the last 5 year period.

Suppose you’re the CEO of a marketing services firm, and you want to gauge interest in various marketing services. You can type in terms like “webinar marketing,” “email marketing,” and “seo marketing.” The results from Google Insights show how the search volumes on these terms compare to each other as well is the overall trends over time.

Some great uses for this tool include:

• Understanding the impact of Seasonality over the course of a given year as well as trends over multiple years
• Tracking the development and Maturity of a Market (more mature markets tend to have more searches whereas less mature markets often involve more evangelistic selling)
• Analyzing trends in specific Geographic Markets as well as understanding how various markets compare to each other

Since Google has the dominant share of the search engine market, Google Insights will give you a good indication of overall market trends.