Market research is the most important aspect of any marketing campaign, whether you are looking into offline or online marketing campaigns. One of the biggest challenges many marketing and SEO agencies face is getting accurate data from their market research for clients in another city or country. There is plenty of software out there, but you will be surprised to learn that most software tools are inaccurate.
For example, you can use a software tool to find out keyword competition and rankings of competitors for an SEO project. The issue that usually arises here is that most software tools do not provide you with the actual competitors your customer is seeing. It is a mistake that often occurs in the field of SEO. It also means a lot of wasted time studying the wrong competitors.
The best way to fix this is first to identify the keywords your client would like to target and also suggest the keywords they should target. Next, get a list of competitors and ask your client to assign someone in his/her team to enter each keyword manually and send a screenshot of the results. This can be an arduous task, but it only needs to be done once every 2 or 3 months, and it means you can compare these results to the results your software is giving you.
Alternatively, you can use a VPN. You may ask what is VPN software. You will be able to connect to a server that is in another city, region, or country. If your client is in London, look for a VPN software provider with servers in London, UK. The idea here is to find a server that is as close to your customer’s location as possible.
Identifying keywords is usually not a problem. However, another issue arises when trying to get search volumes for specific areas. Some software tools will let you narrow search volumes to only a country or region. It is amazing to see how many SEOs will accept the search volumes given for the region and send these to their customer.
When giving customers search volumes, they need to be deadly accurate; otherwise, the Return on Investment cannot be justified. Use Google Ads keyword search volume tools if you can. The biggest problem with this software tool is that it will not give you the most accurate results unless you already spend a certain amount of cash per month on Google Ads. Instead, you will have results that show 10-100 searches per month, 100-200 searches per month, and so on.
If Google Ads doesn’t work for you, invest in a tool that will give you accurate search volumes. As an SEO agency, if you do not have a tool that gives you accurate results, then you may as well not be an agency. No SEO agency can operate professionally and offer a proper marketing service without the right software.
