Geographic Market Research With Google Keyword Research Tools

When doing keyword research you need to understand not only what your customers are searching for but where they are searching from. Google’s Trends and Google Insights can be used alongside the Keyword Tool to give you comprehensive market research data.

Google’s Keyword tool will allow you to see the previous month’s global actual search volume as well as the local search volume in any country where it has a search engine presence. There are big differences from region to region in the words people use to search with. Here is a good example.

In the table below, UK was selected as the local market. You can see the UK has about one quarter of all (global) searches for  (14,800 compared to 60,500)

Now in the US  is another name for .

In the table below you can see in the US there are 49,900 searches a month globally for (i.e. more than for ) however in the UK there are only 2,400 searches a month (i.e. much less than for ), so it is very important that you know what words people are using to search for your product or service in the country or countries you are targeting, and these keyword tools will help you find out.

The Google Keyword Tool shows you the estimated search volumes (based on actual searches from its database) so you can make a decision which keywords or search terms have enough search volume to target.

However to compare different countries or regions to understand whether there is a difference you can use Google Trends.

Google Trends

Google Trends will tell you how the number of people searching for your product or service is moving over time or whether there is any seasonality in demand.

For example here is the Google Trend for and for the last 12 months. For some reason there seem to be an increase in demand in June and January.

Google Trends is also very useful because you can very quickly compare the relative importance of up to 5 search terms.

So for example instead of using the Google Keyword tool, with one search we can see that in the US and Canada, gets more searches than but in the UK, is a much more common term”.

If you are marketing your products and services in multiple countries then this kind of information is essential before you start marketing.

IMPORTANT: A common mistake that many people make is that the bars against each country indicate where countries have the greatest volume of searches. However this is wrong.

This chart does not mean that Canada gets more searches than the US… What it means is that in Canada, is searched for more frequently as a percentage of total searches done on Google compared to US and UK…

To see the absolute volume of searches and understand which country gets more searches by volume you need to use the Google Keyword tool which we first used, and select each country one at a time.

Google Insights

Google insights is similar to Google Trends but more powerful.

Some of the advantages of this keyword research tool over Google Trends are …

1) You can narrow your search down to specific categories. For example if I wanted to research the word “monitor” I can select the category “Computers and Electronics” if I am mainly interested in computer monitors.But if my business related to heart rate monitors I would select “Health” as the category.

2) We can look at whether there is any seasonality of searches. With Google Trends you can see this but all on one timeline. WIth Google Insights, you can compare different years all on the same graph as in the diagram below which compares searches for “flowers” comparing years 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. There is a clear spike in February and May for Valentines Day and Mothers Day. You can check in your own industry whether there are any seasonal trends and you can use this information when planning your marketing activity.

3) You can compare the level of interest for a particular search term across up to five different countries or regions. As with Google trends, this does not indicate total search volume but the “level of interest” relative to all searches within a particular country.

4) You can search the relative volume of searches on other Google properties such as Google Images, Google News, or Google Products.

5) You can see the top 10 searches for any category (such as products) in any country, and also the fastest rising searches.

This keyword tool gives you a thorough insight into your niche market and you can plan much better which words you should be optimizing your web pages for.

The following video demonstrates in detail how to use Google Trends and Google Insights for your keyword research.

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