Google Trends is really useful for some quick niche market research.

Basically it’s a comparison tool on how different search terms have performed over time in the Google index. It also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

The default search shows worldwide trends, but you can select an individual country (from a drop down menu in the top right of the screen). And it’s this geographic regions search that you will probably find the most useful.

Especially if you’re targeting local search when using pay per click advertising.

It’s probably best to give you some examples. Let’s suppose you are based in Australia and have a site selling tea and coffee. Type in coffee, tea then select Australia only and you see that they’re just about equal in popularity except for Adelaide (the capital of the South Australia state, and I think that’s because Adelaide has a lot of English immigrants).

This immediately shows you that you need to build search optimized web pages about tea for Adelaide, or if you’re buying PPC advertising on Google or elsewhere, make sure you do regional targeting for tea sales to Adelaide.

Local search is getting more important all the time, so lets look at some more examples:

Suppose you’re running a lingerie site, or an Adult type site. Which of these do you think you should be pushing to your market – pantyhose or stockings?

This one is a quite dramatic example. And I don’t mean the colour of those pantyhose.

I’m talking about the graph below where blue is for pantyhose and red means is for stockings

pantyhose or stockings

You’ll see from the above worldwide graph that most countries will go for pantyhose, but the Brits go for stockings in a big way

Though, strangely, stockings easily beat pantyhose worldwide in Google News. Look at the news mentions at the bottom of this graph from Google Trends. (note that pantyhose have recently made a comeback) Blue is for stockings, red pantyhose.

Anyway, if you’re promoting stockings you’ll definitely should build pages targeted to the UK market, and pay less attention to some other markets. And with pay per click you’d want to write ads aimed at the British market and make sure the ads only appeared to that market.

You can also narrow your research down further by just looking at Google Trends UK results.

Assuming you’re seeing exactly the same stats as me, you’ll see that a place called Strangely, Renfrew, a small town in Scotland is the stocking search capital of Britain. Why it beats searches for stockings in big cities like Birmingham and Manchester I’ve no idea. Though maybe the Scotsmen wear them under their kilts

I could give you example after example here (and in fact I spent around half a day earlier this week coming up with some) but really it just boils down to thinking more about targeting local search trends. Especially when you’re using Adwords.