Local Keyword Traffic Analysis

Traffic analysis is an important part of keyword research. Some adjustments need to be made to the raw data to get figures more useful for local SEO.

Google provides some very useful data through their generator tool that gives us the number of searches for different target keywords. For Australian keyword research we can only narrow the data down to the country level, not individual cities. Therefore some adjustments are required to give us an estimate of keyword traffic for a specific city.

One option is to attribute the number of searches coming from a city as proportionate to the relative population size. Adelaide has a population of around 1.28 million which is 0.064 of the population of Australia (20 million). The Google keyword tool tells us there are 60,500 (broad) searches for 'Indian Restaurant' in Australia every month. If we make our adjustment, we can attribute 3872 of those to Adelaide (0.064 x 60,500).

Keywords that already have a location included in them, such as 'Indian restaurant Adelaide' don't need an adjustment as the vast majority of searches are going to be from Adelaide already. Below is a table compiling search data for keywords that include 'Adelaide' as a location identifier and keywords that have been adjusted to Adelaide from entire country data.

Keyword	Adelaide Searches (adjusted)	Unadjusted Searches (Broad)
adelaide indian	5400	5400
indian restaurant	3872	60500
indian recipes	1734.4	27100
indian restaurants adelaide	1600	1600
indian restaurants	1420.8	22200
indian foods	1420.8	22200
indian takeaway adelaide	1000	1000
curry recipes	947.2	14800
indian curry	947.2	14800
butter chicken recipe	633.6	9900
indian take away	422.4	6600
indian grocery	345.6	5400
arya restaurant adelaide	170	170

This data is for searches over a month. Due to the nature of broad match data there is some cross contamination of searches, e.g. the unadjusted data for 'indian restaurant' would include searches for 'indian restaurant adelaide,' therefore this table should only be used as a guide.

There's both 'Adelaide' and adjusted keywords within the most searched terms so its important to consider both when assessing local keyword traffic.

The next step in keyword research would be to compare the competition for the various keywords. My post from last week covers local keyword competition analysis.