Some of the many fascinating aspects of the Internet are the differences in how people from various countries approach and use the Internet. These differences are important to understand if your market includes people from countries other than your own.

Naturally, most of us follow the data about our own country’s issues, and typically look at statistics from within our own country. However, you can make mistakes in terms of your advertising approach, and budget if you assume that the people in Great Britain approach the Internet in the same was as users from the United States or Canada or Australia.

Each country’s users have different styles of usage. This phenomenon was recently brought into clear focus by Heather Hopkins, Analyst at Hitwise, one of the Internet’s leading data intelligence gathering resources.

Hitwise recently published the top categories searched by Canadians and they are no surprise:

1. Search engines
2. Social Networks
3. Entertainment
4. Email services
5. Business and Finance
6. Adult
7. Portal front pages
8. Shopping
9. News

When Hitwise looked more closely at the specific word searches they discovered several things:

Canadians use searches to navigate. For example, Instead of typing the facebook url into the browser box, Canadians Google the term facebook to get to the site. This suggests that people are setting a search engine, likely Google, as their homepage, making it easier to move quickly into search mode than to type the url.

Canadians tend to use shorter search terms than some other countries. Canadians predominantly use one to three search words versus U.S. searchers whose searches tend to include as many as five or six words. Brits, on the other hand, are even more terse than Canadians, with the highest scores for using only one or two words.

Games was the highest ranking generic (versus navigational) search term for Canadians at a ranking of eighteen. In fact, eight of the top one hundred search terms included game-related words. This makes Canada similar to France in terms of the popularity of games searching, and very different from the United States where the generic search term games ranked ninety-two.

Canada had many more generic search terms than brand specific search terms among their top terms, which could indicate a lack of brand loyalty.

How can an online retailer use this information?

- Keywords will have to be very finely tuned because Canadians use fewer of them.

- It can be more difficult for small retailers to compete on generic words. Small retailers may need to rely on more paid advertising to get onto the search engine results pages.

- Games and gaming are big draws for Canadians. How can you use that information to your advantage? Does your product in some way lend itself to placing a game or games on your site? Alternatively, you might look at popular gaming sites and determine whether there is any value in advertising on those sites.

This data is unusual and may not at first seem to be all that useful. But, sit back and think about it. If you are in a competitive retail space and you can find a way to use these tendencies to your advantage, you have a tremendous competitive edge over others in your space.

Source verified wholesalers in UK, dropshippers, dropshipping and dropship suppliers and importers now. Browse wholesale dropshippers by country: Wholesale German wholesalers and American Wholesale USA wholesalers.

[tags]search terms,keyword optimization,optimisation,target market,market research,wholesale,dropshippers[/tags]