International Keyword Research With Google Trends

You say pot-ay-to, I say pot-ah-to, you say … memory stick, I say USB drive?

Not only do people from different countries (or different regions of the same country) pronounce words differently, they may also spell them differently or use completely different words to describe the same thing!

If you do business internationally and you are optimizing (or optimising) your site for a foreign country, you had better be well-versed in local lingo. Fortunately, Google can help.

Google Trends is a neat tool where you can compare different search terms’ popularity against each another. This is particularly helpful when you want to make a decision on what to name a page, category or what words to focus on for your SEO campaign. And you can also see which terms are more popular in which region:

Example 1:

“flash drive” vs. “USB drive” vs. “memory stick”

Now personally, I use the term “flash drive.” Intuitively, this is what I would have called the product category and optimized the page for (ego-centric me!)  But the trends show that USB drive and memory stick are both more commonly used to describe what I call a flash drive, unless the site is targeted to the Philippines:

Example 2:

“slow cooker” vs. “crock pot” vs. “crockpot”

Searchers in the USA use the branded term more often, separating it into two words.  The rest of the world is more likely to search for “slow cooker.”

Again, you can use this to compare searches like “running shoes” vs. “sneakers” vs. “athletic shoes” vs. “runners.” If your site caters only to one country, just make sure you look at your country’s data, and not just the aggregate graph when making your keyword decisions.