Canadians, Keywords and SEO

[hello2paul]

In amongst the pages I have for my (http://www.blogstudio.com/woodgnome/laser.html)Laser Eye Surgery Facts, I have reviews of laser eye surgery centres in different parts of the world. In each review I put the brief location detail of the centre. Guess who searches geographically locally the most.....?

Canadians.

Of all the pages I have for UK & Ireland, America, Australia & Canada, it is the Canadian page which draws the most search queries for specific geographic locations.

Why is this? Are Canadians more precise/specific than anyone else in their search engine habits? Is there any kind of research into how the people's of different nations use search engines? Do North Americans have different search engine patterns than Europeans when it comes to looking for something in a specific place?

It really does surprise me - the Canuks are WAY ahead in my stats for searching for local geographic Canadian places.

[StepForth_Jim]

The reasons are fairly simple. First of all, Canadians are very concerned with where things are in relation to where they are. Canada is a vast nation with a relatively small population. Distance is an issue here as our urban centers are often hundreds or even thousands of kilometers apart. In a country larger than many continents, local is important.

Canadians have also enjoyed mass broadband access for over five years now. Over 85% of CDN internet users (home and office) are online via high-speed connections. In the US, broadband is just crossing the 50% threshhold. I am not sure about broadband penetration in the UK but I am pretty sure it is lower than in Canada. Broadband access makes using the Internet easier and far less frustrating thus leading to more personal experimentation and adoption of new ways of doing things, such as local search.

The third reason is a bit more complex but it boils down to our love of hockey. After a nine month hockey season (and the winter months that season takes place in), most of us are too hoarse to yell between Vancouver and Toronto. That's why Canada was one of the global leaders in telecommunications. It also explains why we believed in and invested in Nortel. After being bodychecked and hitting their heads on the ice too many times, many Canadians will believe anything you tell them such as, "This is the year our share prices will all turn around."

[Chris Boggs]

when I started in this field back in 2000, i was fortunate enough to live in San Diego which was back then the #1 geographic modifier used in US searches, and still ranks pretty highly I believe. The joy of optimizing for local results is that eventually the engines will probably default regular results first for unmodified terms such as "restaurant," based on IP address.

I like your answer Jim (welcome to the forums, btw...many of your articles are outstanding). I guess many voices were spared this past NHL season.

[hello2paul]

Jim - that's a brilliant answer :)

For all the non-techncial, non-search engine, non-internet reasons in the world I do believe you mat well have hit the nail on the head as far as the Canadian local search issue is concerned.

Thanks again

p.s. If anyone has anything else to add - please fire away :)

[mcanerin]

An excellent answer, Jim! You are usually safe blaming almost everything Canadian on hockey... ;)

Another reason for highly localized searches (I believe) is simply that Canadians have to interface directly with the US internet marketing dreadnaught more often than other countries, and know that unless they specify Canada or some other localized term they will end up with an American result much of the time.

Canada trades more with the US than the entire EU combined, though we have less than 10% of the population:

Top Ten Countries with which the U.S. Trades For the month of April 2005

Country Name Billions of U.S. $ Monthly
Canada 41.44
Mexico 24.08
China 21.52
Japan 16.32
Federal Republic of Germany 9.60
United Kingdom 7.85
Korea, South 5.56
France 4.99
Taiwan 4.77
Italy 3.56

Source: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/top/dst/2005/04/balance.html

I think it would be hard to overestimate those numbers. If you divided the number of citizens by the level of trade the results would be even more extreme: $1256 per Canadian per month VS $227 per Mexican VS $130 per UK citizen VS $16 per Chinese citizen.

Ian