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 search with.

Here is a good example. In the table below, UK is selected as the local market (exact match type for SEO search volumes). You can see the UK has about one quarter of all (global) searches for ‘Wall beds’ (2,400 locally compared to 9,900 globally).

Now in the US  there is another name for ‘Wall beds’. So you need to check that too. It’s ‘Murphy beds’ but we also better check both the plural and singular versions, as well as ‘Wall beds’.

In the table below you can see in the US there are 40,500 searches a month locally for ‘Murphy bed’ (notice the singular is higher this time), however in the UK there are only 720 searches a month (not shown in images), 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 that out.

The Google Keyword Tool shows 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. And which are the most commonly used.

However to compare different countries or regions in more detail you might like to use Google Trends.

Google Trends

Google Trends will illustrate how people are searching for your product or service over time or whether there is seasonality in demand for it.

For example here is the Google Trend for ‘Wall beds’ and ‘Murphy bed’ globally for the previous few years. Interestingly January 2010 & 2011 look like there is peak for the year and also on a lesser scale in 2011. January sales maybe? A good time to be well stocked up, and have your SEO and PPC nice and solid!

Google Trends is also very useful because you can very quickly compare the relative importance of up to 5 search terms. So instead of using the Google Keyword tool, we can visually see much more. And what’s really cool is we can also see which cities are the big searchers. Perhaps giving you an idea where to setup a store, or be very targeted with Google AdWords.

If you are marketing your products and services in multiple countries then this kind of information is essential when staring out.

IMPORTANT: A common mistake that many people make is to interpret the bars against each country as indicators of countries with greatest search volumes. However this is wrong.

This chart does not mean that Canada gets more ‘murphy beds’ searches than the US… What it means is that in Canada,  ’murphy beds’ is searched for more frequently as a percentage of total searches done on Google.ca 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 looked at, and then select each country one at a time.

Google Insights for Search

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” which helps focus on 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. Google Trends lets you 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 “cheap holidays” in the UK for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 & 2011.

There is a clear spike in January and July. What’s interesting is seeing how the recession has played it’s hand in people searching for cheap holidays in the UK. 2007 showed a high in demand for cheap holidays although as we all felt the squeeze the second quarter of 2008 starting to decline. Despite the speculation of a double dip, it’s encouraging to see 2011 appears to be increasing and not to far away from 2008. Perhaps showing signs that the gloomiest days of 2010 are behind us? Or just that we are a little more optimistic in 2011 . Either way, encouraging insights for the travel industry.

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 Web, Google Images, Google News, or Google Products.

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

Here are more Google Insights examples. And also a useful video courtesy of Google:

Combining these keyword tools gives you a thorough insight into your niche market and you can plan better which words you should be optimising into your site and also where you should be targeting you efforts. Essential for Global SEO marketers.