The temperatures are suggesting that spring has finally sprung. For many, this can mean digging out the garden gloves, consuming a lot of chocolate Easter Eggs, booking up an Easter holiday or taking advantage of the many attractions opening up in time for the improved weather and longer days of sunlight.

Of course, spring also provides a fantastic opportunity for various businesses to capitalise on this seasonal change. Businesses specialising in garden equipment, outdoor attractions, short breaks and Easter gifts are all obvious arenas that are bound to benefit from an increase in desire for their product or service.

While using the time of year and change in season is a great way to predict when your business will receive its next boost, Google Trends is a fantastic tool for determining seasonality.

Google Trends is a tool from Google Labs that shows the most popularly searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to the present day.

Using Google Trends you can see when searches for a particular keyword or key term are most popular, as well as the top geographic regions and cities for that keyword. You can also perform comparisons between keywords as we have done in the following figure.

Trends graph illustrates the searches performed in the United Kingdom in 2007 for the keywords 'gardening' and 'attractions'.

The graph above illustrates the seasonal peaks that begin to occur at the beginning of March in the Garden and Attractions/ Activity sectors. As you can see, both areas see the biggest surge in April, and the attractions continue to remain strong across the summer period until the bad weather begins to take its toll.

Trends graph illustrates the searches performed in the United Kingdom in 2007 for the keywords chocolate.

Chocolate eggs are popular at Easter and here we can also see that chocolates are popular in the lead up to Valentines Day, they receive a small boost in traffic around Mother's Day, which was on March 18th last year, and another boost in the lead up to Easter (8th of April in 2007). We can also see that this industry sees their biggest seasonal peak in the lead up to Christmas.

Give Google Trends a go - find out when to expect the most qualified traffic, when to put aside a dedicated PPC budget, and when to prepare your campaigns for the additional interest.