Find a Niche Market with Google Insights

27 October 2008 3 Comments So Far, Join In!

Guest Post written by Jerry @ Niche Marketing Resources

Niche marketing is a popular way to target specific potential customers. To accomplish this online, you should definitely try to find a niche market with Google Insights, a new search tool from Google.

This easy to use tool is pretty amazing. Check out the help information on the Google Insights website pages before you begin. Right at the bottom of the page there is a message where you can click on “examples”. Or, you can just jump right in and enter a search term into the search box, pick a region, category, and time frame and see immediately how cool this tool is and how it works.

Briefly, you can search up to five terms or groupings at a time. You can use up to 25 search terms per grouping by using the ” “, +, – and (term)” ” signs for matching options. Google Insights provides data for online searches and trends, current and rising. You can filter terms worldwide, by region, or sub regions, such as by states in the U.S., or provinces in Canada. You can select “all categories” or a specific one, and choose a relative time frame.

These searches are very useful for selecting keywords and finding niche terms and geographical regions of interest for those terms. If you try to find a niche market with Google Insights you will receive information, but not the details you might get from regular keyword search tools, so you combine searches. This is great for researching upcoming trends of what terms people are searching for.

The timelines are useful for determining peak interest periods and seasonality. For example, “polarized sunglasses” peaks around April to June, and decreases on either side. Maps that result, show rankings of interest. For example, the US States having the most interest for “polarized sunglasses”, are Florida, Texas, and California. Go further into states to see results by cities in the US data.

Results are scaled and normalized from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest point over time. Results are shown by priority, with top search lists showing terms with the most interest. Also shown are “rising searches”. These are ranked by percentage increases, with new “breakout” rankings for those terms showing growth greater than +5000%.

Knowing all this information can help as you choose advertising messages, create keywords and SEO articles, what terminology to feature, how to market, which features of a product to focus on, and can be helpful in creating brand associations. It can be helpful in finding new markets, where interest is beginning to show or peak. On the drawback side, results are only shown for search terms that get a large amount of traffic, and there are minimums for inclusion. New terms may not show up right away until they meet the threshold numbers.

By all means, to find a niche market with Google Insights is a great idea, it will save you time, and is a very interesting tool to explore. Give it a try today. If you prefer a full walk through on this, check out my latest post: Using Google Insights to Research a Niche Market.