Google Trends is useful for 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 capitol 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
pantyhose or stockings
Sorry guys, no leg pictures 
You’ll see from that worldwide graph that most countries will go for pantyhose, but the Brits go for stockings in a big way
Stockings though, easily beat pantyhose in Google News.
So if you’re promoting stockings you’d definitely have to build pages targeted to the UK market. And with pay per click you’d want to write ads aimed at the British market and make sure the ads only only appeared to that market.
And you can narrow it down further by just looking at UK results.
Assuming you’re seeing exactly the same stats as me, you’ll see that a place called Uddingstone (in Scotland) is the stocking capital of the world. I’ve no idea why… 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.
{ 1 comment }
Wow, Phil, this is an eye-opener. This will really help save some marketing money! Great job reporting (I have never heard about this).
–Linda
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