Internet Marketing and SEO for Walnut Creek Businesses: Top Google Searches

If you’re a local small-medium business (SMB) owner in the Walnut Creek area you may wonder what people search for on Google that relates to Walnut Creek.

You may have thought it would be nice to show up in the top of those local search results.

Just thinking about it logically you might realize that the first thing you have to do is find out what people actually search for.

The analytic information supplied by Google includes 531 different terms that people have searched for that include the words “Walnut Creek”.  One thing to keep in mind is that Walnut Creek, CA is not the only Walnut Creek out there – for example I know there are some Walnut Creek apartments in Texas because they keep posting tweets in Twitter advertising their vacancies.

Of those 531 search terms that people used, the top one was simply “walnut creek”.  This was actually searched for half again as much as the total of all the other searches.  If you’re like me you may wonder what people were expecting to find by googling “walnut creek”.  As you might expect, the top results include the Walnut Creek city government website, the Wikipedia Walnut Creek entry and the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce.

But what were those other 530 searches?  For April 2010 the total number of more specific searches was just under 1,000,000.  The top two searches were for “homes” or “homes for sale” representing nearly 8% of searches or about 73,000 in number.  Following that were hotels, jobs, insurance, restaurants, schools, apartments, stores, inns, office, rentals, condos, movies, etc.

And I love these quirky things – as mentioned earlier, what were people expecting if they just search for “walnut creek”?  Surely they weren’t all after the city government – not over 1.5 million searches in April alone.  But here’s even more of a stumper, why did 15,000 people search for “walnut creek concord”?

Also of interest are trends in searches.  Google provides monthly figures for each of the last 12 months.  Unfortunately this makes it nearly impossible to filter out seasonal variances, but still some knowledge can be gained.

As you might expect, housing searches have increased the past three months.  But a little more surprising is that searches for restaurants have had a clear and consistent increase since the beginning of the year.  Searches for clubs have gone up the last two months, as have searches for John Muir Hospital (you decide).

How You Can Use This Information

This sort of keyword analysis is a crucial early step in developing effective internet marketing campaigns.  Understanding what people search for is a key factor in establishing your online identity and brand.

For a free copy of the complete report on Walnut Creek Google Searches with statistics on all 531 searches simply enter your name and email address in this contact form and specify which report you would like.