keyword research specifically for Canadian market

[rfrazee]

There are a lot of free keyword research tools, but most are focused generically, or have significant US market influence.

I am interested in finding a free keyword research tool that focuses on search activity within the Canadian market. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Ryan

[Terry Van Horne]

Doesn't surprise me that there are no posts. Remember that the US tool will give you a guide and in a lot of cases a client is worried about both USA with the biggest market, the US, literally dwarfing Canada, that should still be your focus unless it's a service or product that is local.... then even if there were Canadadian research it would be a lot less useful. Basically keyword research is mainly a targeting tool IMO, the traffic numbers are meaningless other than to enable prioritization of the keyword list. Even then, the thinking and behaviour, of US and Canadian would be similar enough to use US in Canada. The only real difference is a Ca. will likely use colour rather than color etc. that IMO is the only real difference.

[SemAdvance]

Sign up for your local Google Adwords and use that to do keyword research.

Do not put too much value into any SEO tools or numbers from Wordtracker, GoodKeywords etc.

All keyword tools use data that they "think" should be correct. Basically they use part fact, part guess and part fantasy....

Even Google rounds the numbers off to 000s

;->

[rfrazee]

Terry,
Thanks for the thoughts, I kind of figured this would be the case.

My thought was not really focused on spelling more on choice of search terminology which may be based on attitudinal differences. For example, my guess would be that health related search terms would be very different due to complete different healthcare infrastructure.

That was the idea behind the question.

With the US economy going a bit into the toilet, I was thinking about households who should have more disposable income. It occurred to me that Canadian may be a good market to review.

That is the reason I wanted to find more keyword research that is Canada-specific. Even though I grew up in the US, and would love to think that everyone has attitudes and behaviours (spelled Canadian style), it is hard for me to believe that there aren't interesting information to be uncovered for Canadian based consumers.

I noticed you are from Canada, so I know I am "preaching to the choir" but it seems like Canada isn't the "mini-me" of the US. I look at the UK and the 2006 GDP are relatively similar 1.13 trillion and 1.9 trillion (US is 13 trillion) but again this was in 2006.

I noticed that WordTracker has a UK based Keyword research tool.
UK Keyword Research (http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/uk-keyword-research)

Since then, the exchange rates for the USD vs CAD have gone completely upside down, making the Canadian market, even more interesting (I won't get into the other areas of why I think it is interesting since this is a tech form, not an economic one).

Sorry, I think I got on a little bit of a soap box.

Hopefully someone will come up with a Keyword research tool focused specifically on the Canadian Market.

Thanks for the great comments Terry!

[rfrazee]

Will Google Adwords Local give data for only the Canadian market? I didn´t think it would.

No worries, I am not looking for specific numbers from the keyword tools. They give me an idea, but I understand they are mathematical extrapolations or as SEMAdvance better put "Part Fact, Part Guess, and Part Fantasy..."

Thanks for the feedback!

[xclusive]

you're your best tool when it comes to researching and selecting your keywords...and yes, Google adwords will be your best point of resource to find out keywords trends..

[iaccess]

Google provides a pretty good way to look at keywords by market. You don't have to sign up for Adwords -- you can use the free "external" keyword tool at:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Note that in this tool, you can select a geographic market and a language. Thus you can research keywords in Canada, in both English and French.

There are some differences between the US and Canadian markets, but they are often subtle. An interesting exercise is to compare relative US search volumes with Canadian volumes for various terms. Obviously absolute volumes for US will be much larger, but it will tell you a lot if term "A" is 10% of US volume in Canada, while term "B" is 25% -- that says term "B" is used more prominently in Canada vs the US.

[rfrazee]

Great tip and link directly to the tool. I appreciate it! :D

[Terry Van Horne]

Well there is a difference in the customer. Canadians are more cognizant of debt. GDP is well comparing apples and oranges. We are resource besed economy so our $ has

[rfrazee]

Terry,
Thanks for the tip about the Canadian mindset. I appreciate it.

Ryan