How to Use Google Trends for Small Business Seasons

At the weekend market near my home there are two stalls that sell umbrellas. The first owner has been at it for almost twenty years. Every year, in early May, she hangs umbrellas and raincoats across the whole stall while the sky is still clear and the sun is still fierce. The second owner started two years ago. He waits for the first heavy downpour, then rushes to the wholesaler. By the time his stock reaches the stall, the soaked customers have already bought their umbrellas from her.

They sell the same thing at roughly the same price. One of them knows when the rain is coming. The other finds out when it arrives.

Online businesses have their own rainy seasons. Customers don't search for what you sell equally every month. Some months are busy, some are quiet, and the free tool that lets you read the sky in advance, like that first vendor, is Google Trends. In this article I'll walk shop owners and service business owners through using it step by step: seeing when in the year Thais search for what you sell, comparing two terms, looking by province, and turning the line on the chart into a calendar for promotions, stock and content 4 to 8 weeks ahead. I'll also be straight with you about what it cannot tell you.

Check your own business's seasons first, in under 5 minutes

Open trends.google.com and type your main product or service in Thai, the way a customer would actually type it, for example "ชุดนักเรียน" (school uniform), "ล้างแอร์" (air-conditioner cleaning) or "เค้กวันแม่" (Mother's Day cake). Set the location to Thailand and the time range to "Past 5 years". That's all.

There is only one thing to look for: does the line have a hill that appears in the same month every year? If it does, write that month down on paper, and also note the week when the line starts to climb, because the start of the climb matters more than the top of the hill.

If the line is flat all year, that's useful too. It means your product isn't very seasonal, and you can spread your ad budget and content effort evenly across the year instead of betting on a particular month.

What the Google Trends line is telling you

0 to 100 is not the number of searches

This is the first thing to understand. The numbers on the vertical axis are a comparative index. In the Google Trends data FAQ, Google explains that each data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents, and the results are then scaled from 0 to 100. So 100 is the week when the term was most popular relative to itself in the period you chose, and 50 is half of that.

Put simply, Trends is excellent at timing and says nothing about size. If you want to know how many times a term is searched per month, you need real numbers from somewhere else, which I'll come to shortly.

On the same page Google also says that Trends uses a sample of searches, removes repeated searches from the same person over a short period, and shows terms with very low volume as 0. If you type a niche product name and get an empty chart, it doesn't mean nobody searched. It means the volume is too low for Trends to display.

Compare two terms, and the small one gets flattened

The compare box lets you add several terms at once. According to Google's guide to comparing Trends search terms, the classic Explore page compares 5 groups at a time and the new Explore page compares up to 8. It's very handy when you want to know which word customers use more for your product.

There's a trap, though, and I walked into it while preparing this article. I put "ครีมกันแดด" (sunscreen), "ชุดนักเรียน" and "เค้กวันแม่" on one chart over 5 years. The averages came out at 21, 33 and 1. The Mother's Day cake line sat on the floor almost all year and only rose to about 13 to 15 in Mother's Day week of 2022 and 2023.

When I looked at "เค้กวันแม่" on its own, the picture changed completely. The Mother's Day hill was clear every single year.

On its own, the 0 to 100 scale is calculated from that one term. A cake shop that looks only at the combined chart and concludes "nobody searches for this" would miss the most important season of its year. My advice is to look at one term at a time to find the timing, and compare terms only when you want to know which one is bigger.

Search term versus topic

When you type a word, Trends offers two kinds of choice. On its page about comparing search terms and topics, Google defines a search term as the exact word or phrase people type, whether on Web Search, Image Search, News Search, Google Shopping or YouTube, and a topic as a group of related search terms that share the same concept or refer to the same real-world entity, across spellings and languages.

The Thai word "แอร์" (air, as in air conditioner) is a good example. When I looked at it over the past 12 months, the related queries box mixed in "iPad Air", searches about Nakhonchai Air's bus station, and searches about a Thai Airways flight attendant, because Thais also use "แอร์" for air hostess. An air-conditioner shop looking only at "แอร์" gets a chart with other people's searches mixed in. If your word has several meanings, try a more specific phrase such as "ล้างแอร์" or pick the air-conditioner topic (shown as "เครื่องปรับอากาศ" in the Thai interface) instead.

Looking by province, without reading it as sales

Scroll below the chart and you'll find "Interest by subregion". I looked at "ชุดนักเรียน" over the past 12 months. The province at 100 was Yasothon, followed by Nong Bua Lamphu and Chaiyaphum at 99. Bangkok scored 50, and Phuket scored 38, the lowest on the list.

Please don't conclude that people in Yasothon search for school uniforms more than people in Bangkok. The number is a share of all searches in that province. Google says plainly in its FAQ that different regions showing the same search interest don't always have the same total search volumes. Bangkok searches for an enormous range of things, so school uniforms look like a small share there. What the province view genuinely tells you is where this topic is a big deal for the people who live there, which is very useful when choosing where to target ads or what local content to write.

Rising related queries are content ideas your customers wrote for you

On the same "ชุดนักเรียน" page, the rising related queries included "ค่า ชุด นักเรียน 2569" (school uniform allowance 2026) and "ตัวอย่าง บิล เบิก ค่า ชุด นักเรียน 2569" (sample receipt for claiming the 2026 uniform allowance). So around the start of term, a number of parents are looking for how to claim uniform costs. A uniform shop whose website says clearly what kind of receipt it can issue is answering a question customers are actually typing in exactly that season.

Real examples from Thai search data, 5 years back

I pulled everything in this section myself from Google Trends on 29 September 2026: location Thailand, Web Search, past 5 years, weekly data. Every number is that term's own 0 to 100 index, not a count of searches. Thai terms are shown with their English meaning.

ชุดนักเรียน (school uniform) peaks every year between late April and mid-May. The top week each year was the week of 8 May 2022 (100), 30 April 2023 (77), 12 May 2024 (68), 27 April 2025 (64) and 10 May 2026 (71). The normal level is around 25 to 30, the line starts climbing from late March to early April, and there's a smaller bump in the first week of January.

เค้กวันแม่ (Mother's Day cake) has the shortest season in this set. Thai Mother's Day falls on 12 August. Viewed on its own, the line sits near zero most of the year, begins to move in the last week of July, and peaks in the first two weeks of August. The week of 7 August 2022 scored 100, the week of 6 August 2023 scored 86, and the last three years peaked between 42 and 51. The season is only about 2 to 3 weeks wide. A shop that starts building its page when it sees the line move will have only a few days of real selling time.

แอร์ (air conditioner) peaked in April in every year from 2022 to 2026. The highest week was the week of 28 April 2024 (100), and in 2026 the peak was the week of 12 April (84). The line starts climbing in March, and the lowest point of the year is usually between December and January.

ล้างแอร์ (air-conditioner cleaning) is especially interesting for service businesses. It peaks between mid-March and late April every year, and bottoms out from late November to January at an index of only about 12 to 18. Notably, in 2026 the single highest week came early, 22 to 28 March (78), with April staying busy after it, so a technician waiting for April would have missed the year's top week.

ครีมกันแดด (sunscreen) peaks every March to April, and the highest week in five years was the week of 2 April 2023 (100). There's one thing I have to tell you honestly: the yearly average fell from about 60 in 2022 to about 36 in 2025 and 2026, roughly 40% lower. I don't know the reason, and Trends doesn't say. People may be searching brand names directly, or searching inside shopping apps that Google doesn't see. The lesson is that a falling line doesn't necessarily mean a shrinking market. Always check it against your own sales before you decide anything.

"I've been selling for years. I already know my busy months."

You're right, and I believe you. An owner who is in the shop every day knows customer rhythms better than any tool, that knowledge is valuable, and Google Trends isn't here to replace it.

What Trends adds are things that are hard to see from behind the counter. First, sales always lag behind searches. People search and compare before they decide to buy, so if you wait for sales to rise before you act, the moment when customers were choosing a shop has already passed. Second, timing shifts from year to year, as with air-conditioner cleaning arriving in late March in 2026. Third, it shows which words customers use and which provinces care most, and that feeds directly into how you write your web pages and set up your ads.

I think the best approach is to put the two side by side. Your experience tells you which month sells. Trends tells you when customers start looking for you.

Trends gives you timing, real numbers give you size

Because Trends only gives an index, decisions that involve money, like how much extra stock to order or how much to spend on ads, need real volume figures alongside it. I use two sources.

The first is Keyword Planner in Google Ads. According to the Keyword Planner help page, it gives estimates of how many searches a keyword gets each month, and you need a Google Ads account with its setup completed to use it. For example, while preparing this article my team checked Keyword Planner on 29 September 2026: "google trends" averaged about 33,100 searches a month in Thailand, and the Thai spelling "google เทรนด์" about 2,900. If you want the full method for choosing words that match your customers, I've written it up in how to find the right keywords to drive quality traffic.

The second source is more accurate for your own business: your website's Search Console, which shows how many times each query made your site appear in search results each month. If you haven't set it up yet, start with our beginner's guide to Google Search Console. Once your site has a full year of data, you'll have your own seasonal chart to lay alongside Trends.

Why starting before the season compounds

A new web page needs time for Google to find it and start showing it in results. A shop that publishes its school-uniform promotion page in mid-March already has a page in place when the line starts climbing in late March. A shop that starts writing in early May may see its page rank just as the season ends.

Stock works the same way. Factories and wholesalers have their own production cycles, and a shop that orders before the season gets complete sizes and has time to photograph the new stock for the website.

The real compounding happens in year two. The Mother's Day page you build this year only needs a menu and price update next year, and it already has a history in search results. The calendar you write down this year can be refined next year using your own shop's real data.

The 4 to 8 weeks before the climb is a window my team uses for our own planning. It isn't a Google rule. Products with long production lead times may need to start earlier, and service businesses that can adjust quickly may need less.

The smallest seasonal calendar you can start today

You don't need a complicated system. One sheet of paper or one spreadsheet is enough. Make 12 columns for the months and a row for each of your 3 to 5 main terms. Shade the months where the line forms a hill, then count back 4 to 8 weeks from where the climb starts. That's the date to begin three jobs: ordering stock, preparing the promotion, and finishing the web page or content for that season.

Take the uniform shop from the data above. The line starts climbing in late March and peaks from late April to mid-May, so late January to mid-February is when to start ordering, and the web page and promotion should be ready by mid-March. For a cake shop, start preparing the menu and photos in early June, and get the Mother's Day cake page online by early July at the latest, before people start searching in the last week of the month.

For this calendar to work fully, a shop needs a website where it can add a new promotion page itself every season and measure which search terms customers came from. If you're looking for a site like that, you can see what's included in each plan on the TumWebSME website packages page.

A real lesson from our own team: preparing for the season includes checking the live site

Let me share something that happened to us. When TumWebSME rebuilt its website in 2026 and started running Google Ads, the code for counting conversions had gone live with the site, but because it sat in the wrong place, it wasn't actually running on the live site. It stayed that way for about a week after the ads went live. Clicks came in as usual, and conversions read zero the entire week.

If that happened in the peak week of a season, like the start of term or the week before Mother's Day, the damage would be far worse, because the selling window is only a few weeks long. The lesson we took is that season prep should end with opening the live site yourself before the line starts to climb: press the order button, the call button and the LINE button, and check that everything works and is actually counted.

The other thing to check is whether your site can handle the busiest day. I've covered what to ask your provider before that day in detail in your website crashed on your biggest promotion day because hosting wasn't enough.

A 6-step plan for your business's seasonal calendar

1. Write down 3 to 5 words customers use for your product or service, in Thai as they would actually type them. Ask your sales team or look through customer chats.

2. Open Google Trends and look at each term on its own, location Thailand, past 5 years. Note the months that form hills and the week the line starts climbing.

3. If a term has several meanings, switch to a more specific phrase or choose the topic, and check the related queries box for unrelated searches mixed in.

4. Look at the province view to find where this matters most to people, and note rising queries as ideas for web pages.

5. Check real volume in Keyword Planner or your own Search Console before deciding on stock and ad budgets.

6. Count back 4 to 8 weeks from the start of the climb and put the dates for ordering stock, launching the promotion, publishing the page and checking the live site into your calendar.

How to measure whether the calendar worked

The first measure is Search Console. Compare the impressions and clicks of your seasonal promotion page during the peak months with the same period last year. If the page starts getting seen as the Trends line begins to climb, you published in time.

The second is real sales or enquiries in the peak weeks, compared with last year before you planned ahead.

The third is something our sales team does every day. Whenever a customer calls or messages us on LINE, the team asks briefly, "Where did you find us, and what did you search for?" and writes it down, because web analytics tools can't see LINE conversations. Those answers tell us which words in the calendar brought in people who actually buy.

Finally, when the season is over, open Trends again and see whether this year's climb started when you expected. If it shifted, adjust next year's calendar. And if you'd like to add ads to your peak season, the basics are in our Google Ads guide for business websites.

The umbrella seller I mentioned at the start isn't better at this because she's lucky. She simply remembers which month the rain comes, and hangs her umbrellas before the clouds roll in. Google Trends is a weather diary of your customers that Google has kept for years, for free. All that's left is to read it and hang your umbrellas in time.

If you'd like our team to help you work out what seasons your business has, and what pages your website should have ready before your own rainy season arrives, tell us about your business. We'd be glad to think it through with you.

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