Trend Prediction to read updated data on search volumes

It is a function that was born at a precise moment in history – its official debut took place on April 10, 2020, exactly one month after the first month of lockdown imposed as a countermeasure to the Coronavirus pandemic – and that responded to specific needs at that time, but revealed a necessary usefulness and practicality even later, when the situation finally normalized. We are talking about Forecast Trend, SEOZoom’s feature initially known as “Covid-19 impact,” precisely, which is based on an algorithm capable of providing accurate and rapid estimates of keyword search volumes, analyzing current trends in real time to offer up-to-date data.

Trend Prediction, the algorithm for measuring search volumes in real time

Unique of its kind among SEO tools, the Trend Prediction algorithm sits within the seasonality graph in keyword analysis and allows everyone to have clear information, but most importantly real data, to understand what is happening to searches in current events, and not on the canonical (and sometimes outdated) historical search volumes.

Technically speaking, the function uses search trends and reworks the estimate by projecting the interest shown in the previous 12 months onto today’s real scenario.

In practical terms, this makes it possible to visualize in every way, and practically in real time, what the forecast search volumes are for a keyword we are interested in, so as to make keyword analysis even more fruitful for strategic evaluations.

Clicking on the “show trend” button in the seasonality graph opens a more specific screen that shows three different pieces of information:

• Average monthly volume, consisting of a bar graph with volumes indicated by Google tools (i.e., the classic organic traffic estimate value that we display in all tools)
• Dashed green line, showing the trend from the previous year.
• Solid red line, showing the realistic search volume figure estimated by the Zoom Trends algorithm.

The red line, specifically, highlights the volumes detected by SEOZoom and actually predicted for this year, based on the surveyed data and trends; the green line, on the other hand, shows the trend detected last year: with our tool, SEOZoom shows in a projection executed on the basis of the base trend and surveyed data what is Google’s data crossed with what it actually saw in the organic SERPs as the months went by.

The Zoom Trend is thus an index that helps us understand how and (if) the average keyword volume has changed as a result of the latest updates. In this way, those working in digital at any level-from blogs to newspapers to professional consultants-can more easily and quickly understand search trends, compare data more accurately, and make appropriate considerations in a more strategic and informed way.

As we wrote at launch back in 2020, the idea behind the algorithm was to allow us to track the sudden and unforeseen evolution of online searches, in many areas completely disrupted by the looming Coronavirus and subsequent social and personal restrictions; in particular, at the time we asked “How have our priorities changed in this first month of lockdown? ” and “How much have people’s searches changed on Google because of all the measures to counter the Coronavirus,” trying to understand what then had been the effects on SERPs on search volumes for individual keywords and various industries, from tourism to DIY.

About a year later, in January 2021, our own Ivano Di Biasi announced the feature’s name change, motivated not only as “a superstitious gesture for the future” (at a time when Covid countermeasures were still frequent and stringent), but also as a necessity and a factual fact: the predictions provided by the tool, in fact, apply to any type of event that might ever occur in the r