I'm sure you want to have thousands of visits to your blog or products website, but are you targeting the right people and keywords?
I do believe that articles should be optimized for search engines but for people that really care about your content. To find those people, it's important to learn how to profile your readers in order to optimize your keywords for the region they are from, their age, if they are men or women, or even from what device they are reading your blog.
Why it's important to profile your users
The main reason for knowing what kind of people is consuming our content (either our products or articles) it's because it gives us an idea of what those people could be interested in and how they look for it which allows us to create more meaningful content for them.
Once we know more about our readers, we have to think about what keywords we want to use in our content which will be optimized by the country our readers are from.
You would be surprised to see that countries with the same language as Canada and the United States search for information in a different way. This also happens between different regions of the same country. To detect this, Google Trends is a good tool to see these things.
What is Google Trends
Google Trends is a web application that shows how frequently a given search term is entered into Google's search engine.
In my honest opinion, it is useful if you have a blog or a product because you can compare how often different keywords are used by country, region, or city, and this is gold. I want to point out that Google Trends don't work well for long-tail keywords, so I recommend to use Google Trends only for specific words.
For example, if you're blogging about plants you might want to know how people who have pets look for plants that are not toxic so they fellas are safe.
Example of how to use Google Trends to know what keyword target
Most of the users of the worldwide community for people who love plants that I'm building are 25-35 years old people from the United States, in particular from California (San Francisco and Los Angeles) and Florida (Miami) that consume my content in smartphones.
Following Pareto's law principle, I'll be comparing keywords on United States because is where most of my users are from.
Compare keywords in your country of interest
People who have pets and want to make sure the plant they are looking for is not toxic for them, search by plants safe for cats, or plants safe for dogs as you can see in the image below.
Thanks to this quick research we identified how readers look for information. In order to create content relevant to them and improve your SEO with the right keywords, we must use the safe plants for cats, or the safe plants for dogs terms instead of pet-friendly plants which was the one I thought that would be the most used.
Compare keywords by region and cities to go more niche
Google Trends allows us to see subregions too. This is interesting because people from different regions of the same country have different habits and behaviors.
Sometimes it may happen that for example that people that live in the United States use more the keyword A than the keyword B, but the people who live in the region we want to focus on, use the keyword B. In case that happens, you should target the keyword B as it is the one used in the area where the users who use your application live.
As you can see in the image below, I'm focusing on California because is where the users of the green community I'm building are from.
Google Trends allows you to compare keywords at the city level too. You'll see data only if the keywords have traffic in that city because some cities Google might not have data.
Locate the usage of keywords with the map graphic
You can use the map graphic to have a better visual representation of where the keywords are more popular in the country, or regions you're targeting.
As you can see in the image below, most of the users look for plants safe for cats instead of other keywords, and the hot areas in the United States are the East Coast, West Coast, and the north-east area.
Conclusions
To know what keywords are the most used in the different regions of the country you're targeting is useful in order to write better and more specific content that might be meaningful for the people you want to reach out, and to run optimized paid ads because we can segment better our audience which allows us to go super niche.
Instead of running a paid ad in the United States of pet friendly plants, I'd be running a paid ad in California (or another concrete state) with the plants safe for cats term targeting people from 25-35 years old.