Exact Local vs. Exact Global

i think because most people are trying to rank for google . com which will be targeting USA people so they will check the local searches of USA.

I often wondered that myself - however, I find that using the Adwords tool is a guestimator at best.

Using local makes more sense because it's focused on your country (or the country you want to focus on). Keyword meanings can different in every country and using global results may skew things badly (the term football is a good example). Use local results only. If you want to refine it even more use Insights. Or, use a small AdWords campaign to get even better data.

I use exact local (for US results) as that's where most of the traffic is. I'm getting the majority of my visitors from US anyways, so i suppose that's one metric that i base my search on.

Well that depends whether you are targeting locally or globally.

If you're using amazon for example, to trade with your site, you could potentially go for global.

However if for example you're going to be flogging shoes, that you order from a wholesaler, holding stock and trading with customers in your country/state, then maybe local would be better option.

... so it really depends on what approach you're looking at.

Nicely explained by a few people there - the fact is a lot of people just don't understand what global/local even means, hence the strange advice like "aim for high local searches" - which is meaningless advice in and of itself, especially since, as people have pointed out, they probably mean US, but haven't actually stated that - which is confusing for newbies.

What I do is always check globally first and see the TOTAL number of searches worldwide. Then I look at some of the major markets individually (i.e. set "local" to US, then UK etc.) and see what the search volume and potential Adsense CPC is for each of those countries, or if I am thinking of some kind of affiliate site then researching whether the product I am targetting can be bought in any of those countries (e.g. Clickbank products). Then I can add those up and see how close I am to the global figure, i.e. what proportion of potential visitors could come from the "key [i.e. wealthy] markets" and get me sales.

If global is 10,000, but it turns out only 1000 searches are from Western countries and the rest are distributed among many other countries that I cannot even determine then I will figure the niche is not a goer.

But blanket statements about always going for local etc. just don't make sense, so ignore them!

I'll be honest here.
I have not found a single keyword that gives me the visitors that any tool said I would get. They have alll given me considerably less.

The reward is in all the longtails I get.
I favor picking easy to rank for terms, throwing up 1,000 words and then letting the longtails dictate what I write about.

Works for me