The local SEO observatory
Local SEO in numbers: 21 markets, 2,229 cities, 1.3B people
How many local markets can SEO actually address? To measure it, we mapped local search across 21 language markets, crossing each country's real cities with 100 trades. This observatory aggregates that data — freely reusable with attribution to PageOneBoost.
What the data shows
- Local SEO is not a niche: the 21 markets studied cover 2,229 cities and nearly 1.3B people.
- Crossing each city with 100 trades yields 222,900 distinct local markets — that many “trade + city” searches where a business can rank first on Google.
- Demand concentrates: the largest cities hold a major share of the population, yet mid-size cities add up to a largely untapped local potential, for lack of players targeting them.
The 21 markets, ranked by covered population
For each market: native language, reference country, number of major cities covered and their combined population.
Top 25 most populated cities in scope
Methodology & sources
Cities and populations come from open reference datasets: GeoNames for international markets, INSEE public data for France. Each city above a population threshold is crossed with 100 local trades (crafts, health, retail, services).
City names are shown in each market's native language (Tokyo reads 東京, Lisbon Lisboa). Nothing is extrapolated: exact search volumes belong to third-party tools and are not claimed here.
This data is freely reusable under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license, provided you credit PageOneBoost and link to https://pageoneboost.com/observatoire.
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