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If your one of the many business owners that are in the business of running your business and not spending all day on the web (that’s my job) trying to figure out what people in your local area are looking for on the internet then you may find this post pretty interesting.
If you know one thing about marketing then you know research is key to your success. Figuring out what people want to buy or what service they are looking for is key to online success. For many business owners keyword research is geek talk and most do not have a clue where to get started. They use phrase they think people are using without doing a stitch of research. As we all know, assuming things sometimes gets you in a lot of trouble.
In steps Google Insights. This is a nifty tool that Google has recently released that has a ton of potential when it comes to keyword research, especially when looking at a local market.
Here is an example of how it works. I used the core keyword restaurant for this example.
The image above shows I selected 3 city’s; Denver, New York and Los Angles and I set the filter to reflect the last 30 days. As you can tell from the graph, there is plenty of search volume for the core keyword “restaurant”. A quick glance shows that Denver’ search for that term is leveled off while New York’s volume is rising.
The next section of the page shows you which city’s within your local area the searches came from. I have it set to my own regional area.
The bottom of the page shows you what terms you can drill down even further into and find the meat and potatoes ( keyword phrases that pay) of this particular market. From looking at these results I can see the phrases; mexican restaurant, denver restaurants, italian restaurant, chinese restaurant and restaurant coupons. These would all be terms that would warrant further research.
Armed with this information you could then make a decision as whether to go after these terms and optimize pages on your site and try and capture some of these customers.
If your stuck for keywords and need a little help, Google Insights might just give you the peice of the puzzle you are missing.
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