Monday, February 11, 2013

Finding Local Keyword Search Volume in Google


I ran into a need to find local area search volumes for some broad keywords and found a method that you may find useful. This will be especially helpful for when you need to see local search volumes for broad keywords (like “plumber” or “pizza” or something when people are searching locally), which is becoming more important with the numbers of people that are searching on mobile devices and not putting in the local area names because they know their device already has them geolocated.

In case you are not aware, for the Google Adwords Keyword tool, the “Local” column is for the entire US (not very local), so for searches like that it would show MILLIONS of searches per month in the Local column. Not very helpful for what we call “local search”.

Instead of using that tool, use the Google Traffic Estimator tool:
https://adwords.google.com/o/TrafficEstimator

Put in your keyword list in the box (put each keyword phrase in quotes for better results)
Click on Locations (above the box)
– remove United States
– type the name of the center of your metro area and find it in the auto-suggest dropdown
(if you click “Nearby” there you can also see other close by areas you might want to add to the list)
Click on Get Estimates
now fill in Max CPC: 15000
fill in Daily Budget: 2000000
click outside of those boxes and the data should update below.
Daily Impressions will be the equivalent of Search Volume with these settings

Voila! Now you’ve got Daily local search volume estimates for your keywords!
Of course to get the monthly totals just multiply the Daily Impr. by 30.

Enjoy!
A~