Anytime you travel to another part of the country you are reminded that people are all different.  Tomato, Potato, Out (Canadians) and countless other subtle differences make each area unique.  The same is true business, whether it’s service descriptions, product descriptions or describing problems.  There is no need to travel around the country to figure out the words consumers are using to describe what you offer, you can use Google Trends.  Here’s an example:   “Potty Training” vs. “Toilet Training” (yes I do have children and a potty training website)

I went to Google Trends and typed in “Potty Training, Toilet Training” and pressed Search Trends.  Here’s what I got:

Google World Trends for Potty Training and Toilet Training

Did you realize that the UK is pretty well split between the two and that Australia is exactly the opposite of the US?  Now if you don’t sell products to Australia or the UK this is just interesting information that hasn’t helped your business, but if you do, please consider yourself educated. If you don’t you need to FILTER RESULTS.  On the top right, of Google Trends you can filter by country, then region, then year.

Below is the 2007 trending for “Potty Training” (red) and “Toilet Training” (blue) for the US.  I call this interesting information:

Google Trends for 2007 in the US for "Potty Training"

I now have a list of the top states (Utah, Oklahoma, Kansas) and cities (Salt Lake City, Louisville, Denver) searching the term “Potty Training”.  If I want to do any offline marketing, radio marketing, event sponsorships etc., I should probably look focus on one of the top 3 States and/or Cities (all from one search).

Now what happens when we look at the trending for “Toilet Training”?

Google Trends in USA 2007 for the term "Toilet Training"

You can see that “Toilet Training” is always the less used vocabulary for teaching a child to use the bathroom (in the US) but you now have an idea of where Ad Testing “Toilet” vs. “Potty” by region could start to make sense.  Adwords has some slick tools to focus your paid search marketing by region which is how you start to utilize this information.

Because I do have a potty training website that sells dvds and books for children and parents, doing this type of trending analysis helped me think about regional ad targeting options and reminded me of the importance of ranking for all the terms related to my industry, not just what I call it.  There are lots of other uses for Google Trends and this is just one, but it helped me and hopefully you have a new tool in your web marketing arsenal.