Is there a way to find traffic counts for those very important but relatively infrequent long tail local search terms? I've seen this question many times over the years with poor results.
There seems to be a way to get those results now.
Two days ago Google started adding both last month and average monthly traffic totals to its keyword tool. Its the first time they have done this.
You can access the tool through the above link or access it directly if you have an adwords account.
I'm sure many or most are familiar with the tool. For long tail local searches the tool might typically provide information for the generic industry phrase and popular variations.....but it typically never gives "drill down extensive data" for a host of industry phrases for a particular city or state.
Try this. It might work for you.
Search for a topic that might be extremely local. One example could be variations on the phrase tech school variations could be computer school, computer classes, computer degree, art school, drafting classes, nursing degree, etc.. When adding these phrases add a lot of long tail local phrases.....such as drafting classes St Louis, St Louis drafting classes, Chicago nursing degree, Illinois computer school, NYC computer training, Cleveland tech school, Ohio tech schools, Columbus tech schools, etc. Make sure you add a lot of long tail phrases with city and state names.
Having done this several times I'm getting a wide variety of responses including at times a lot of variety on long tail combo geo/business service phrases.
Its the first time I've seen this depth at Google.
For a particular industry phrase I saw estimated monthly google traffic for the main industry phrases at roughly 300,000, 200,000, and 75,000 and a slew of secondary terms with lesser traffic....and then I saw those coveted long tail phrases with a large number of state or city names and the major industry term....with many showing estimated monthly traffic in the 300-600/month volume and estimates for some geo areas as few as 30 searches/month.
Getting that depth of information simply requires adding a lot of keyword phrases into the tool including and especially a wide variety of phrases with local cities or states.
Of final interest....for the particular term referenced above, Overtures (now vanished tool) used to generate numbers roughly 1/4 of the google estimates.
I was surprised and pleased to see the drilling down of data in google adwords. The traffic estimates for terms with long tail geographic phrases is typically rare from keyword tools.
I experimented a couple of times using different business terms.....and many geo terms. I didn't get the same level of "drilling down" on each experiment...but was successful some of the time.
I only experimented using "broad terms" rather than exact terms. I'm going to re experiment later using exact terms. I'm curious if google will show more depth and specifically the relative traffic when a geo term is first and the business term is second and vice versa.
Didn't get that kind of depth from google on the first set of experiments but then I didn't try...
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