Going Local with Keyword Research

International Keyword Research image

Last week we beefed up the regional support inside Market Samurai, with the release of Market Samurai v0.79.1

BORING!

I mean - why in the world should you even care about something so trivial and insignificant?

OK, let me be blunt…

It’s because, if you don’t care, you’re missing out on an opportunity to make a STACK of money!

You see, the reason I’m writing this post is because we regularly release really cool new features inside Market Samurai.

BUT they’re not big features.

Usually they’re tiny little new tools that we release - little and unsuspecting pieces of smart technology - but ALL of them can make a huge difference to your internet business’s bottom line.

The crazy part is only a tiny handful of people ever grasp the full power of many of these cool new features, and begin using them!

So let me show you how…

Open Market Samurai now.

Go-on, I’ll wait!

Now that you have Market Samurai open, click File > Settings > Google in Market Samurai, you’ll see a long list of countries.

Previously, Market Samurai could only gather SEO competition and [English-language] traffic data from the 25 most commonly searched regions in Google.

Now, the list has been expanded to around 230 regions and territories (including Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and dozens of other regions .

This is good news for two types of people…

Firstly, it’s good news for niche marketers.

If you’re looking for niches online, rather than looking for a micro-niche, why not promote a larger niche - but in a country where SEO competition is weaker.

It will require you to have some intelligence about how you search engine optimize your web-site, but it can also have some significant benefits.

Secondly, it’s good news if you’re running an offline business in a local area.

Now you can get accurate search and competition data for promoting your business to local customers in your region, and find out specifically what it will take to get rankings in your country or region.

Related Posts on Other Blogs:

  • Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization … - This is part 12 of a 12 part series on keyword research. This series will guide you through four distinct phase of the keyword research process, providing you step by step guidelines to help you gather, sort and organize your keywords …
  • Tips Towards Improved Country Specific SEO - The Internet is a global marketplace that can can open up worldwide possibilities to even the smallest of enterprises and organisations. However, jumping into a global marketplace both feet first can actually be more damaging than …
  • country-specific domain names and seo - a client asked a question today: “should i use a country-specific domain name (tld) if i am targeting [that] market?” the short answer is yes. there are several benefits from doing this, and having a site aimed at each country you are …
  • how to organize your international communication on your website - you can guide your country specific seo with google webmasters tools to get visibility in foreign searches. your content is on the same subject:. the two options above are perfect if your content is on the same subject. …
  • Most important reason why 80% of The Online Projects Failed - It doesn’t matter what kind of traffic method you are using to get visitors, you are either putting too less time and effort to test it or you have done a very bad keyword research! Keyword research is the most critical thing for your …
  • 3 ways to NOT get web traffic - It is easy to ignore your keyword research. It happens to me from time to time when I get to excited about something. If you ignore research for your site will end up with something you will have very hard to attract traffic to. …

9 Responses to “Going Local with Keyword Research”

  1. Frank Says:

    Are you saying that MS now handles non english keywords, too? It looks like you imply it, but I’d like to be sure.

  2. Hi Frank,

    No - I wasn’t clear in the post. Market Samurai still gathers English-language data.

    Brent

  3. Frank Says:

    That’s too bad… ignoring the native language of a customer is not good idea.

    Also, I think the huge number of countries and territories supported needs to be put into perspective.

    Recently, the CEO of MySpace mentioned that there are only 9 countries in the world where Internet Marketing is a viable business. While he didn’t name them, we can all guess. I suspect at most half of them speak english natively. Supporting those 9 in native tongue would me much, much more relevant than supporting 230 in english only.

  4. Hi Frank,

    I’d agree that it would be a powerful tool to be able to search in all 41 languages supported by Google.

    Unfortunately, it’s just not viable for us to do this.

    When Chris DeWolfe (CEO of MySpace) mentioned the 9 countries where internet marketing was viable, he wasn’t talking in general…

    Instead, he was talking about MySpace’s own core business.

    His comment was:

    “Our international strategy is different than our competitors. We look at advertising dollars, and 95% of all advertising revenues come form 9 countries… In those countries, we have 30% more unique users than our closest competitor in those 9 countries. So that is really our strategy.”

    He wasn’t speaking in general about the viability of marketing outside of those 9 countries - just that the 9 countries accounted for a significant portion of MySpace’s core business revenue - so that’s where they were concentrating their time, resources and energy.

    This is identical to Noble Samurai’s strategy for Market Samurai.

    Although there’s a LOT of money to be made from internet marketing in Mandarin (Han) Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Portguese, and Spanish, Market Samurai’s customers in general do not speak these languages.

    Around 95% of our customers are native English speakers.

    The cost of reprogramming Market Samurai so that it’s able to recognize umlauts, essets, Chinese characters, Japanese characters, Spanish accented characters, etc would be substantial.

    It might make more sales, but it’s unlikely to recoup the cost of redevelopment and support - so it’s just not commercially viable for us right now.

    If we had a more substantial number of non-English speaking users, we could potentially take the risk. It’s something that I would personally love to do. But right now, it’s impossible to afford.

    I hope this helps you out.

    Brent

  5. Andrew Says:

    Your timing is perfect.

    Here I am sat scratching my head wishing I could find some data in a country that wasn’t previously on the list. I stumbled onto your blog to take a break and there was your announcement! ta dah.

    Excellent work again Brett and the team.

    Thanks

  6. gio Says:

    I use it sometimes with italian words and it seems working, now about local research it looks like i get same results when i change the settings of region in google settings

  7. Hi Gio,

    What are the regions that you are using?

    @Frank - just wanted to let you know - There’s some more globalization settings on their way… Stay tuned… We just discovered something cool

    Brent

  8. gio Says:

    Hi Brent,

    sorry but i was wrong, i just tried to change the google settings about region, inside the same project, now i realize that need create new project and then change google country to have new results

  9. Ah, yes!

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