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.
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Are you saying that MS now handles non english keywords, too? It looks like you imply it, but I’d like to be sure.
Hi Frank,
No – I wasn’t clear in the post. Market Samurai still gathers English-language data.
Brent
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.
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:
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
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
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
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
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
Ah, yes!
Hi Brent,
I only just checked back to discover your lengthy and thoughtful second reply to my original comment!
Good to know 95% of MS customers are anglos. I wouldn’t have thought the majority would be so staggering. Less competition is fine with me;-)
I was thrilled when you recently added support for all the languages without much fuzz. I guess you discovered some technicality that made things much easier than you originally thought.
The magic of software… beautiful! Thank you!
[...] Market Samurai’s country settings. Brent Hodgson wrote a really useful blog post about it here: Going Local with Keyword Research | Noble Samurai __________________ Isha "We ask ourselves: Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, [...]