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I find Google trends and Google Insight to be excellent tools when it comes down to market research. Google trends gives you a great view as to what’s “hot” on a daily basis. Every day people are typing thousands of keywords into Google so the visibility into this could be a gold mine as Google provides a great insight into what market is hot right now. In addition, one can drill down on an item and look at related searches so you get some ideas for a good list of long tail keywords. On the same screen you get also related news and related web sites that are coming up in the search for a specific keyword.

If you go to the Google search bar you can type that keyword and Google will suggest some additional keywords to consider including their search volume. You can find out additional keywords and go back to Google trends to conduct comparison analysis to see which key word gets more traffic.

Once you have some ideas as to what search terms or markets you want to go after, it is time to expand your research and utilize Google Insights. Google insights provides a graphical representation for worldwide search volume for a specific search term and you can drill down to a city level and get some great ideas for laser targeted PPC campaigns or SEO campaigns. In addition, the tool provides some additional keywords to consider as well as rising searches.

The combined usage of these two tools provides a wealth of information for doing market research. This is only one step for finding new market niches. I also recommend to look into magazines, trade publications, forums, RSS feeds…etc. to complement these tools.