In September of the year 2012, Google officially merged it's under-the-radar keyword/trending research tool into one.

It's now officially known as Google Trends:

This history/forecast lookup tool helps me almost predict which words or blog I'm writing about is going to have staying power and bring me a lifetime of free, organic search-engine traffic.

Of course, when the words I write match what's being search, the odds are good Google (and other search engines) are going to feature my blog post… maybe even send me these search visitors.

For example, let's say I'm going to write a blog post about an "expert."

By entering the words "expert" into Google Trends, it returns a very interesting line chart:

From the year 2005 to 2010, people searched for the word "expert" at a steady, upward rate. But after that it's trending down.

When I click on the "forecast" option, Google approximates what's to come a year in advance.

This downward path concerns me. Instead, I want a long-term, steady upward rise. Because I want a lifetime of steady traffic – not a one-and-done rush of traffic.

Google Trends allows me to add a term and compare the trendlines. So I add the word "guru" – like this:

… And I like what I see. The word guru is coming very close to catching up to a downtrending "expert":

On the bottom, right-hand side of these results are related terms:

There's an option to see which related terms are breaking out… A click on the "rising" tab reveals up to 10 suggestions:

If any of these suggestions fit the bill, I click on the phrase to do a lookup. (In this example, these suggestions don't excite me… but many times I find awesome phrases I've never thought of.)

My final lookup is to compare plurals versus singular keywords:

Wow! What a difference just one extra letter makes… The plural version of "guru" trends WAY lower.

Google Trends offers a bunch more options and reports… Everything from filtering by geography, news… even images.

Google Trends is one of my best-kept secrets – until now.