We love data at pepper. We love it, because from the rawness comes a beautiful intelligence that guides business decisions.
Recently, we were elbow deep in SEO data for our Nation’s Capital, Canberra. Being a generous bunch, we thought we would share these SEO Canberra insights with you. So let’s take a look
SEO Canberra – The SEO state of the Capital
To start with, let’s put the capital cities up against one another. Based on monthly search volumes from within Australia, the keyword “Melbourne” wins the popularity contest with 194,000 searches each month.
What does the rest of the world think about Canberra?
But which Australian capital interests the entire world the most? “Melbourne” beat “Sydney” by a nose with 714,000 monthly searches VS Sydney’s 645,000.
While “Darwin” was of little interest to Australians, it was of significant Interest, to the rest of the world with it coming in third to “Sydney”. We’ll dig a bit deeper on this international interest in Darwin at another time.
SEO Canberra keywords and search volume
Are there specific keywords of interest relating to Canberra? Here’s a snapshot of the 20 top keywords:
| Keyword | Monthly Search Volume (AU) |
| canberra weather | 281,000 |
| canberra times | 207,000 |
| weather canberra | 73,000 |
| canberra | 72,000 ‘ |
| canberra raiders | 57,000 |
| bom canberra | 36,000 |
| tv guide canberra | 32,000 |
| canberra personals | 31,000 |
| gumtree canberra | 28,000 |
| dendy canberra | 24,000 |
| university of canberra | 22,000 |
| canberra weather radar | 22,000 |
| the canberra times | 21,000 |
| canberra tv guide | 18,000 |
| access canberra | 18,000 |
| ikea canberra | 18,000 |
| escort canberra | 16,000 |
| transport canberra | 14,000 |
| canberra airport | 12,000 |
| canberra escorts | 12,000 |
Categorising SEO Canberra keywords
There are a few similar terms, so we went one step further and categorised each keyword in the list of top 100 keywords. We’ll be looking to re-visit this and categorise even more keywords, but we’d expect the general trend to continue as search volumes start to trail off significantly.
Opportunities with SEO Canberra
The data is all well and good, but what opportunities does this show us?
We start by looking at search volume. There’s no point looking to take advantage of SEO with a keyword with no volume.
Next, we look at difficulty. The trick is to find keywords that have significant volume and low difficulty.
To combine this, we simply take our data and divide the keyword volume by the keyword difficulty to get a volume /difficulty ratio. Simply put, whichever keyword has the highest volume/difficulty ratio, is something that could rank with only modest effort.
Lastly, you need to manually eyeball the list. For example, “Costco Canberra” has a good volume/difficulty ratio, but it is a very specific search, with someone looking specifically for “Costco”.
With all that in mind, consider the following list our top picks for Canberra related keywords that will offer you the most SEO Canberra opportunity:
| Keyword | Difficulty | Volume | Vol / Diff |
| melbourne to canberra | 0 | 5,100 | 5,100 |
| airbnb canberra | 0 | 4,800 | 4,800 |
| canberra to sydney | 0 | 3,700 | 3,700 |
| sydney to canberra | 2 | 6,000 | 3,000 |
| flights to canberra | 1 | 2,800 | 2,800 |
| whats on in canberra | 2 | 5,300 | 2,650 |
| canberra bridge club | 0 | 2,400 | 2,400 |
| canberra to melbourne flights | 0 | 2,300 | 2,300 |
| melbourne to canberra flights | 0 | 2,200 | 2,200 |
| rent canberra | 1 | 2,200 | 2,200 |
| flights canberra to melbourne | 0 | 2,100 | 2,100 |
| things to do in canberra | 5 | 10,000 | 2,000 |
| rentals canberra | 1 | 2,000 | 2,000 |
| what’s on in canberra | 1 | 1,900 | 1,900 |
| canberra rentals | 1 | 1,900 | 1,900 |
| brisbane to canberra flights | 0 | 1,900 | 1,900 |
| canberra marathon | 1 | 1,800 | 1,800 |
| air bnb canberra | 0 | 1,700 | 1,700 |
| car sales canberra | 0 | 1,600 | 1,600 |
| part time jobs canberra | 0 | 1,400 | 1,400 |
| canberra to brisbane flights | 0 | 1,400 | 1,400 |
| whats on in canberra this weekend | 1 | 1,400 | 1,400 |
| canberra to sydney bus | 1 | 1,400 | 1,400 |
| canberra accommodation | 6 | 8,100 | 1,350 |
note: where difficulty = 0, we have divided by 1 to avoid divide by 0 error.
Wrapping up
It turns out Canberra’s not just all about Parliament House, Questacon, Floriade and Fyshwick.
Our hope is that if you have a curiosity in SEO, especially relevant to Canberra, these little titbits will give you some ideas to explore further.
If you do have any specific questions or would like a similar analysis done for another city, town or area of interest, just give us a shout and we’d love to lend a hand.
If you’re curious, we used Google and ahrefs as to collect our data.
