How Many Tourists Search For Your Product Online

People use search engines to find products and services. When using them, most people use common words known as keywords. They enter the keywords, press search and wait for the results. But something worth noting happens along the way.

Someone interested in walking might search for something like 'walking'. If there is an interest in walking in a particular location, they might use 'walking in Scotland'. If they're keen on a walking trip in Scotland then they could use 'walking trip in Scotland'.

Keywords can be general or very specific which means:

• Significantly more people look for common keywords like 'walking' than specific combinations like 'walking trip in Scotland'.
• The more specific the combination they use and the more it describes your products, the more qualified they are as prospects.

The first step in measuring online demand is to see how many people search for a product like yours. At this stage, we're only interested in people using specific combinations that best describe your product. For example:

Only a fraction of people looking for 'walking' are qualified prospects for a company selling walking trips in Scotland. On the other hand, everyone using 'walking in Scotland' or 'walking trip in Scotland' is a qualified prospect. So how many qualified prospects are out there searching?

Using freely available data

Search engines provide numbers of daily or monthly searches. They tell you how many people searched for a particular word combination in a given month and can be used as indication of online demand.

As an example, we will measure online demand by looking at how many people search for 'walking in Scotland' in the Overture search engine:

Step 1

Visit Overture.

Step 2

Enter 'walking in Scotland' in the box, hit Enter and write down the number they give you. Around 400 people a month search for 'walking in Scotland'. These are qualified prospects, actively searching for walking-related tourism products.

The difficulty in measuring online demand

For every of those 400 people, there are countless others using a wide variety of word combinations and synonyms to make their search more specific (hill-walking in Scotland, walking in Scottish Borders, for example), etc.

It's impossible to come up with an accurate and comprehensive figure so how can anyone say "It's worthwhile getting a website" when this information is not even enough to make an educated guess.

While the 400 searches a month is not an accurate figure and on its own it tells us nothing, it's an essential piece of the puzzle. We now need one more piece of information to help us make sense of it and namely: How much are these prospects worth?.