At a keyword level, you will have the YoY trends expressed as a positive or negative percentage (or multiplier), comparing the search volumes from last month to the same month of the previous year. And we also calculate the same at a group level.

SEOmonitor retrieves monthly Google Ads search volume data for each keyword. It then compares the last available month’s search volume to the same month one year ago.

This metric is usually displayed as a percentage, but if the trend is higher than +100%, it will be shown as a multiplier, such as x2:

Keywords with a trend greater than +1000% – usually with negligible previous search volume – are marked as newcomers with a corresponding icon:

When there are high shifts, the keywords will be considered exploding or tanking and grouped in the Shifting Trends smart group, accordingly. A clear example would be the newest iPhone model versus a previous model.

At a group level, we use:

for all the main keywords (so no close variations) in the given list.

We won't always have the YoY information once you start tracking a keyword, because at least 13 months of search volume data are needed to calculate the trend and Google Ads' API only provides the last 12 months. If the keyword is already part of SEOmonitor's keyword databases, you will have this data readily available. If not, it will become available within the next 30 days.

To help you find new ideas for keywords based on shifting trends, we've also developed SEOmonitor Trends.

It's not uncommon for multiple keywords have the exact same trend values (for example +18% or -33%). These only feel like patterns, and it happens because of the search volume thresholds from Google Ads. The search volumes are provided on a non-linear scale, so their trends would appear to also be on some "tiers". You can read more about this here.