As an SEO agency based in Leeds, a lot of our clients are local businesses who want to be found in Leeds for their services. We thought it would be really interesting to review the most popular search terms in Leeds and review how difficult it would be to get found for them when doing SEO.
Top 10 Most Popular Search Terms for SEO in Leeds by Volume
- Leeds United – 2.2m
- Leeds Weather – 368,000
- Leeds – 246,000
- Leeds Festival – 110,000
- Leeds Castle – 74,000 (You’re not getting confused, we don’t have a castle in Leeds, this is in Kent)
- Leeds Escorts (new business idea?) / Leeds Rhinos / Leeds University – 74,000
- Leeds Building Society – 60,500
- Ikea Leeds / Leeds City Council / Leeds Homes – 40,500
- Dogs Trust Leeds / Gumtree Leeds / Jobs in Leeds / Leeds Restaurants – 33,100
- Bars in Leeds / Hotels in Leeds / Minerva Leeds – 27,100
For the purposes of keeping this interesting, we’ve only taken the top listing for any particular topic (e.g. Leeds United) and haven’t included any related terms that also rank highly for SEO in Leeds. Clearly, we can see a lot of the city’s big brands, institutions and events are listed here. The biggest surprise is that from a business point of view – the escort industry is the most popular! This could lead us down a very interesting SEO rabbit hole to see how many websites there are to justify the volume of searches… But, let’s take a look at some of the other popular industry searches for SEO in Leeds instead. We’ve got Leeds Homes, Jobs in Leeds, Leeds Restaurants, Bars in Leeds and Hotels in Leeds. Clearly, we can see that the housebuilding, recruitment and hospitality sectors are the most competitive when it comes to search volumes, and therefore vying for a top spot on Google. But what if we take a look at the keyword difficulty (KD) as another angle to see the most popular search terms in Leeds?
Top 10 Most Popular Search Terms for SEO in Leeds by Keyword Difficulty
- Leeds United – 91% (please note there were a lot of LUFC related search terms for difficulty, more than for volume)
- Leeds – 90%
- Leeds Uni – 77%
- Reading Leeds Festival – 72%
- Leeds College – 70%
- Leeds Live – 67%
- BBC Leeds – 64%
- Leeds Hospital – 62%
- Leeds Newspaper – 62%
- Leeds Art – 60%
As SEO experts based in Leeds, this was a really interesting exercise for us. We had to scroll through almost 250 search terms just to get 10 different subjects, as so many of the top search terms for difficulty were about the same topic: Leeds United. Another interesting observation here was the volume of searches with a high keyword difficulty that were extremely niche and direct, e.g. HMRC Leeds contact number (88%). We left this one and other similar ones out of the list, but from an SEO perspective it’s interesting when the keyword difficulty is so high for a search term that isn’t frequently searched (volume of 50) and who else would be doing SEO on this term?
It’s also encouraging to see that local searches in a niche have a much lower keyword difficulty, so although the search volumes may be high (see previous list) they could be quite easy to get found for with some decent SEO. For example, we looked at the KD for ‘Leeds Homes’ (the most popular industry term on the first list) and this was 52%. Oh, and because you’re all wondering, yes we did search the KD for Leeds escorts and this came out at 31%.
So, finally, we felt we needed to understand the lay of the land better by looking at the most popular keywords by the number of results.
Top 10 Most Popular Search Terms for SEO in Leeds by Number of Results
For this final list, we’ve also included the volume and keyword difficulty, so you can get an idea of the cross section of results from an SEO perspective.
- Who owns Leeds United – 1.7 billion results / 480 volume / 41% KD
- The View Leeds – 548 million / 140 volume / 18% KD (interestingly the top searches here have all been for ‘The Vue Leeds’)
- Is Leeds in England – 522 million / 170 volume / 30% KD
- Leeds 2010 – 401 million / 170 volume / 31%
- Things to do near Leeds Castle – 399 million / 70 volume / 28%
- Cheap B and B Leeds – 239 million / 50 volume / 13% KD
- How long does it take to get to Leeds – 231 million / 140 volume / 26%
- One You Leeds – 210 million / 590 volume / 24% KD
- Leeds Services – 208 million / 390 volume / 33%
- 1 day in Leeds – 206 million / 50 volume / 10% KD
This list has left us the most confused yet. What happened to Leeds in 2010? Who types ‘b and b’ rather than B&B? It’s very rare that we’d take the results of a keyword into account, as so many articles and links can be indexed for certain search terms. But, this has been another interesting list nonetheless! We’re kind of gutted there isn’t a secret view in Leeds though that we didn’t know about.
So what do you make to our list? If you’ve read this far, leave us a comment below as we’d love to hear your thoughts, and let us know if we should do more of these. If you haven’t read it all, no worries either, we just wrote this blog to optimise for our own SEO purposes, to be found for ‘SEO Leeds’, so the jokes on you really. Thanks for reading and we’ll see you in our next one!
