I was curious as to how effective local search engine optimization is. Lets say for exampe I have a website about pet kennels. I go to Google keyword tool and it says the term pet kennels has average seach volume.. Now lets say I want to optimize my site for my local area. So i change my keyword to 'pet kennels san francisco'. Google keyword now says this search term has no data....... How can that be? Should I even expect traffic if I rank #1 for that search term? Or is the keyword tool inaccurate?
I'm not sure though but Maybe it means google has too little or incomplete data for that search term.
There just isn't enough data for that specific keyword phrase. It still will recieve some type of organic traffic, but not as much considering it's a long tail keyword being specific to a region. Make sure if you do local targeting to utilize the geo-targeting option in Google Webmasters Central. You can actually run an Adwords champaign for that keyword and just do it strictly in Google search to see how much actual traffic it gets per day. Just count the impressions, as this will give you a general idea of how many searchers that phrase gets per day.