Google Trends: check the world's interest in your niche
Trending topics with Google trends
Source: butterscotch
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.
Example 1: selling tea and coffee in Australia
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).
Comparing 'coffee' and 'tea' in Google Trends
'Coffee' (blue) narrowly beats 'tea' (red)
Tea is popular in Adelaide
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.
Source / read more: philwiley.com
Example 2: you're running a furniture site
Local search is getting more important all the time, so lets look at some more examples. Suppose you’re running a furniture site. Which of these do you think you should be pushing to your market – beanbag or hammock?
Beanbag or hammock?
Hammock easily beat beanbag worldwide in Google Websearch. Blue is for stockings, red pantyhose.
If you're promoting beanbags, build pages targeted to the UK market
Anyway, if you’re promoting beanbags 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.
Reading, the beanbag search capital of Britain
You see that Reading, a large town 36 miles west of Central London, is the beanbag search capital of the UK. Why it beats searches for beanbags in larger cities like Birmingham, Bristol, London and Sheffield I’ve no idea.