Should Google Trends Match Organic Traffic to My Site?

[jacob.young.cricut]

When looking at Google Trends and my Organic Traffic (using GA) as percentages of their total yearly values I have a correlation of .47. This correlation doesn't seem right when you consider that Google Trends (which is showing relative search traffic data) should match up pretty strongly to your Organic Traffic.

Any thoughts on what might be going on? Why isn't Google Trends correlating with Organic Traffic? Shouldn't they be pulling from the same data set?

Thanks,

Jacob

[Deacyde]

Google's trends are for all searches happening for that keyword.

Unless you're the only website relevant for that keywords, odds are you're not going to even remotely match up to what Google says is " trending ".

Even for your brand name, when you search you don't just get your website, you get your facebook, youtube, BBB an anything else, even if others have a company named something likeminded.

So your website isn't the only thing to get that traffic, you'd get the majority of the traffic, so it's possible that the trends match somewhat but highly doubtful you'd match up even in the 90% range.

Another way to look at it is, Google is giving you a idea of how many people searched for a keyword, problem is, everyone doesn't use the same keywords to get the same results. This is even true with brand names, if you have a two word brand name, people might search with it all as one word, or mispells it, even butchers the name but still gets to the results. In that case you didn't see there trend data unless you looked it up, so thats some extra numbers your way.

It's more of a guide for you to gauge how popular a keyword is and high likely it is that people will be searching for that keyword. It's not really meant to be used as concrete data for organic traffic comparisons. That's what benchmarks and historical data is good for.

Hope my long winded explanation helped some.

[jacob.young.cricut]

I don't really understand what you're saying. Maybe I should have mentioned that the main term I'm looking up in Google Trends is our brand name and that we show up #1, and #3 for that term. We have for more than a year. So if Google Trends see's that, that specific keyword is increasing in search volume over the year, shouldn't we see similar trends with traffic coming from that keyword?

[EGOL]

OMG!  No!

If you would have earned #1 position from the beginning of Google, that would have been your best opportunity to have organic traffic that matched what you see in Google Trends.   HOWEVER, Google has become, a better webmaster, more concerned about meeting shareholder expectations, and has begun modifying the format of the search results pages to keep you on their search pages for more page views, display more ads, display more ads at the top of the SERPs, increase shopping results income, make more money.   So, if the #1 organic position, would have remained at the tippy-top of the SERPs for all of those years, then your traffic graph might be similar to Google trends.  Instead, the reality is that your traffic graph would have shown either a much steeper decline or much less dramatic growth.