How to understand demand near me

Using search data to make better decisions

When promoting a product or service, demand has to factor into your decision making.

With so much data freely available, not using it and making assumptions instead is a bad idea.

Imagine you want to launch a new product or do business in a new area. You need to feel confident you will succeed.

If you know what to look at, and where to look, you can use the data to inform key decisions across all aspects of your business.

In this blog, I’ll take you through understanding demand through data, the metrics we look at and what they mean.

You’ll learn how data can help you grow your business.

First party vs third party data

You’ll hear the terms “first party” and “third party” a lot.

First-party data is information collected directly from your company, such as website visitors, customers, or users.

It is gathered through interactions with owned channels like websites, apps, email, CRM systems, and social media accounts.

First-party data is highly valuable because it is accurate, reliable, and compliant with privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR).

Examples:

Website analytics (Google Analytics aka GA4)
Customer data from CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce)
Email marketing interactions (Mailchimp, Klaviyo)
Social media insights (LinkedIn Analytics, Facebook Insights)

Although Google Search Console doesn’t sit on your website, it uses Google’s data first hand so we consider it a first party tool. It reveals actual search queries that bring users to your website, uncovering new keyword opportunities.

Third-party data is information collected by external organisations that do not have a direct relationship with the user. This data is often aggregated from various sources and sold to businesses for audience targeting, advertising, and analytics. Due to privacy changes (e.g., the phase-out of third-party cookies), third-party data is becoming less reliable and more regulated.

Competitor analysis tools, like SEMrush and Ahrefs are third party tools.

They can further enhance your understanding of the market landscape, helping you identify content gaps or underserved niches but the data is less accurate and should serve as an estimate or guide.

Tools to help your decision-making

Here is a list of digital marketing tools for demand analysis

🛠 Google Ads Manager (for keyword planner)
🛠 Google Search Console
🛠 Google Analytics
🛠 Looker Studio
🛠 SemRush
🛠 Ahrefs
🛠 Social Media Analytics (Linkedin, Instagram, Meta)
🛠 Spark Toro
🛠 Gemini
🛠 Chat GPT

These tools are our pallet and paint. They allow us to paint a vivid picture of performance and opportunity.

What are people searching for?

Understanding what your audience searches for is key to making smarter business decisions.

If you want to grow your business, data analysis and keyword research shouldn’t just be a consideration, they should inform your decision making, especially if you intend to use digital marketing to promote your products and services.

Begin by identifying keywords relevant to your audience’s interests, needs, or problems.

You should know a lot about your business and your target audience, so you should at least be able to create a list of ideas.

You could also create a customer avatar to help visualise your ideal customer.

Look beyond high-volume terms to understand the intent behind searches—are users looking to make a purchase (transactional), seeking information (informational), or aiming to reach a particular site (navigational)?

Tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs can reveal insights into search volume, competitiveness, cost-per-click (CPC), and user intent.

These insights are important because they can tell us how much a keyword is really worth to us, and whether we want to spend time creating content or building a PPC campaign around specific terms.

Search Volume

Search volume indicates how frequently keywords are searched, providing clues to demand.

High-volume keywords can signal strong interest but usually come with high competition. That’s because they are in high-demand.

When looking at “near me” terms, analysing search volume can give you a good indication of how many people are searching for your products or services in your catchment area.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

CPC helps illustrate competition level and potential cost implications, even if you're not directly investing in PPC.
Knowing how competitive keywords are can stop you wasting money or set expectations for how hard it will be to generate customers for products or services.

CPC also tells you a lot about demand. Perhaps there are seasonal highs and lows. CPC will increase and decrease depending on how many people are bidding on the keyword at a given time.

This can be useful for budgeting or knowing when you need to switch marketing channels.

Search Intent

Understanding search intent helps us learn why people are searching for things. If they are asking a question they are probably looking for information. These types of informational keywords are less valuable as they are slowly being hoovered up by Ai search results.

Leveraging keyword data strategically helps inform content planning, social media strategy, product positioning, and even broader business decisions.

Understanding demand, competition, and user intent ensures your marketing efforts are well-targeted, cost-effective, and aligned with audience needs.

Can I ask Ai?

This is tricky. I do not doubt that Ai will get good enough to crawl through data and find useful information.

The problem is, at the time of writing (March 2025) Chat GPT isn’t great at counting, nor is it reliable when crawling Google data sources. This means you can’t really trust it.

There are other tools like CoPilot and Gemini that are better at data analysis. If you feed them the right, clean data along with the right prompts, you can get decent results.

It is still essential, particularly where accuracy is required, to check the data manually. Make sure what you are seeing from Ai is correct.

Practical example: EV Charger installer near me

Let’s say you want to start installing EV chargers for businesses in Hertfordshire:

Know who your target customers are. For example homeowners or letting agents might want to find EV charge point installers to install them in residential car parks
Make a list of search terms. Don’t just go with what you think is right, do deep research on this.
Use keyword planner to explore the volume and cpc for the keywords you have identified in Enfield. This should give you an idea of what demand is like and if there are potential quick wins to be had. Cast the net a little wider if you need to.

We can see that there is good demand for EV charger installers and the price is quite good, despite high competition.

Use third party tools or run Google searches to explore intent of the searches and find out what’s coming up in your local area, this will also give you an idea of actual competition and what’s appearing on Google search results.

Based on this quick research installing EV charge points looks to be a viable business for Hertfordshire and a PPC campaign would work well.