Central Coast Suburb Search Volumes

When you are marketing online for a local business, which suburbs do you want to show up in? Which ones are worth measuring your performance in?

For local businesses who serve clients locally (either at their location or at their customers' location), you can expect that users are searching for "your search term" plus "their suburb".

At the time of this writing Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council have merged into on Central Coast Council. Still, at this stage there is still a mindset of the two ends of the Central Coast, so I will address them both separately for ease.

In Gosford Shire there are 78 different suburbs. In Wyong there are 75. It is difficult to implement activities that will help you rank in all 153 suburbs, so it is instead helpful to know which suburbs are searched more frequently. Then with some knowledge of your local clients, you can put together a list of 10 or so key performing suburbs from the major centres where your clients live, or where you'd like to win more customers.

First let's look at the big three, Central Coast, Gosford, Wyong. I often get asked, "which gets searched the most, Central Coast or Gosford?" See this table for the answer:

Clearly “Central Coast” gets the biggest share of the Google searches. However, does that mean it is a better phrase to target than “Gosford” or “Wyong”? It depends on the nature of your business. And what you know of your clients.

The more local you are, like a bricks and mortar shopfront where people come to you, then Gosford is potentially a better choice (assuming your shop is in Gosford). Whereas, if you are a service based business who can work with a client anywhere, then Central Coast may be a better choice for you. In saying that, Central Coast is also more competitive, for the same reasons.

So if you need lower hanging fruit, then Gosford may be the right target for you. Or, if you are willing to spend a few minutes thinking through the suburbs where your customers live, then a suburb based SEO campaign might be even better. If that is the case, then you will find the tables below to be very useful.

To clarify, what we are talking about here is the tendency for people to add a suburb to the end of their search when they are looking for a local business. Like “Plumber Wyoming“, or “Photographer Toukley“, “SEO Central Coast“. Each different suburb or region brings a different set of results in Google, including different map results (officially called Google My Business listings). It is the role of good SEO to attempt to rank your website at or near the top of the search for all the products/services PLUS all the suburbs that are commercially relevant to your business.

Though with so many suburbs, it can be very expensive to attempt to rank for them all at once. Use this comparison chart to help choose the suburbs for your campaign:

For the Northern end of the Central Coast the results may also surprise you. There are a couple of big hitters that might be anomalies, just because of their name. That is, Magenta and The Entrance. The keyword tool is not able to differentiate if the search is for that suburb, or for that word in another context. So take those two with a grain of salt:

What do I do with all this info about SEO on the Central Coast?!

I know this is information overload. But the discipline is WELL worth doing at the start of your search optimisation campaign. Whether you are going to Do-It-Yourself SEO, or hiring a local SEO company, insist that you start by making a list of the top suburbs you want to rank in. And plan you pages/content around those top results.

Most people tell me they want to rank in all of them. Sure, that’s the goal. But start by focusing your efforts so you dominate your own backyard. Otherwise you will continue to rank for none of them.