Are you wondering what people in the United States (and around the World) are searching for the most? Then you’re in luck!
We’ve just uploaded fresh data from December into Keywords Explorer—our monstrous keywords database—and naturally, we wanted to know which Google searches were most popular this month.
SIDENOTE.
the total size of Ahrefs’ keywords database is now 7.4
BILLION keywords (3.1 billion of which are Google search queries from the United States alone). Which makes our database the biggest one in our industry.
We have pulled two lists for the United States:
- Top100 most searched keywords in the US—a list of terms with the highest average monthly search volume as of today;
- Top100 new keywords in the US in December—a list of the most popular search queries that we haven’t seen up until December.
And then we also pulled these “best new keywords in December” across all countries in our database, which turned out quite interesting as well.
So here you go:
Top 100 Google search queries in the US (in December 2018)
Unsurprisingly, this list is almost entirely dominated by branded searches. But we have decided to leave the list as is so that you could see the full picture.
SIDENOTE.
We removed all
NSFW queries from this list. What you see above are the top 100 “clean” search queries. Here’s
the raw, uncensored list for those that want it. (You’ve been warned!)
Before we move on to the next list of trending keywords, it’s important to understand the keyword metrics that we display.
Search volume
Search volume shows how many times a given keyword is being entered into Google per month. And, because the search demand on many keywords tends to fluctuate from month to month, the number that we give you is an annual average.
SIDENOTE.
here at Ahrefs we calculate search volumes by modeling data from Google Keyword Planner against clickstream data. This method has proven to be quite accurate and we keep tweaking our model to achieve even better results.
Return Rate
Return Rate shows how often a person will search for that keyword again. It is a relative metric, so RR 3.55 doesn’t mean that people perform the same search 3–4 times a month on average.
But Return Rate is very useful when comparing two keywords.
For example, the keyword “spotify” has RR 1.72, which means that people rarely search for that keyword again. (Probably because they were just looking to download this app or learn what it is.)
On the other hand, “facebook” has RR 11.25, which means that people search for it quite frequently. (Probably because many people don’t have Facebook on their bookmarks bar, and simply Google it each time they want to access it.)
Top 100 NEW Google searches in the US (in December 2018)
This list is much more interesting because it shows things that people in the UShave started to care about in December all of a sudden.
What’s interesting, is that some of these new keywords had a big spike in search demand and then faded to nothing quite fast. While others seem to have a continuous search demand, that shows no signs of fading.
“kelsey berreth” vs “president bush funeral” are two great examples:
I didn’t include Return Rate this time, because the vast majority of these Google searches were very close to 1.
But I included Keyword Difficulty metric, which is super low for almost all keywords in this list (since they’re brand new).
Keyword Difficulty
Keyword Difficulty score shows how hard it would be to rank in top10 search results for a given keyword . It is based on the size and quality of the pages thatalready rank there.
Given that KD scores for most of these keywords are so low, I wonder if this very article will rank for some of them?
And that’s it for the US.
Let’s look at what bothered people around the World in December.
Top NEW Google searches around the World (in December 2018)
I know Ahrefs has a ton of customers from all around the world, and hopefully, everyone will find a fun keyword from their country in this list.
It looks like phrases related to the new year dominate this list.
Top NEW Google searches in YOUR niche (in December 2018)
Did you know that you can use the “newly discovered” feature in Keywords Explorer to find search queries (containing any “seed” keyword) that were recently added to our database?
Keywords Explorer > enter a seed keyword > Newly discovered
You can do some seriously cool stuff with this!
For example, imagine that you run a movie reviews website.
You could enter “netflix” as your seed keyword and find all the newly‐discovered Netflix‐related terms that we discovered in the last month. Go a step further by adding the word “review” to the “Include” filter to see all the new Netflix movies that people want to see reviewed.