Free Tools To Find Your Target Market

Keyword analysis tools will tell you how many searches have been conducted for a specific keyword or keyphrase, but who is doing the searching?

What are their demographics, geographic location and time of the year they are searching? It makes a difference in your ad copy, ad placement and time of year you invest more heavily in advertising.

DEMOGRAPHICS

I’ve found two free tools that will help you find the demographics or your target market based on keywords.

The first is Microsoft’s Demographic Prediction site. It provides a quick and dirty look broken down by male/female and age. [link no longer works]

They also have a site called Detecting Online Commercial Intention where they divide keywords into those looking for information and those looking to buy – a great aid for filtering keywords for your pages and ads. Look under Tools on the nav bar for other possibilities. [link no longer works]

The second site for finding demographics is QuantCast.com You enter sites and they tell you the demographics. It’s doesn’t cover every niche, but if you enter some of the sites that show up in the top ten results of the search engines for your keywords, try entering a few of those to get an idea of your target market.

It breaks it down into sex, age, income, ethnicity, education and whether they have kids. They also show the number of visits to the site, whether the site accepts advertising, geographic location of the searchers, and what else the visitors also like. It’s really pretty comprehensive if the site is in their database.

GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION and TRENDS

In addition to QuantCast, above, the two best sites for finding where your searchers are located are Google Trends and Google Insights for Search.

Google Trends can break down search terms for the last month or for years. It shows seasonal trends and location can be broken down by county, subregion or city.

Google Insights for Search is still in beta but adds a lot more detail. You can run graphical comparisons of multiple keywords by Category, Seasonality, Geographic Distribution and Search Patterns.

Remember, it’s not only how many people are searching but who those people really are. These free tools can help you get to know your customers.