Devon, Cornwall, Bath and the South West
The South West is the clearest illustration of the UK regional pattern. Search volume across Devon and Somerset is substantial, and the competition for it is remarkably thin, a combination that does not last indefinitely.
Two things make this market distinctive. The first is seasonality: tourism reshapes demand across the year, and a business serving both residents and visitors is really serving two audiences with two different search behaviours. The second is geography, service areas here are physically large and thinly populated, which means the "which town do I target" question has a different answer than it does in a dense metro.
Devon and Somerset are large enough that county-level targeting frequently outperforms town-level targeting. A strong Devon page with genuine sections on Exeter, Plymouth and Torbay tends to beat three thin town pages, and it carries none of the risk.
Bath is its own case: small, affluent, heavily visited, and with a heritage-property housing stock that generates genuinely specific search demand, conservation work, listed buildings, period property specialists. That specificity is a gift, because it is content a national competitor cannot write.
Bradford, Wakefield and Yorkshire
Yorkshire has some of the strongest search volume in the entire UK dataset relative to how little serious competition exists for it, and Bradford in particular is an outlier.
It is a large city with a large and diverse business base, and it sits close enough to Leeds that many businesses target Leeds by default and neglect Bradford entirely, leaving a substantial, genuinely searched market comparatively open.
Wakefield shows the same shape at a smaller scale. Real volume, real intent, very little content built to serve it properly.
Practical note for anyone operating across West Yorkshire: the cities are close enough that a single business frequently serves several of them, which makes the architecture decision important. A regional West Yorkshire page with genuine city sections usually beats separate thin pages for Bradford, Leeds, Wakefield and Huddersfield, and it is far easier to keep genuinely good.
Liverpool, Salford and the North West
Liverpool is a strong local search market with a specific characteristic worth knowing: map pack visibility matters unusually much here, and the businesses that have understood that are taking a disproportionate share.
The city has a dense concentration of independent businesses and a population with a genuine preference for local firms over national chains. That preference is a real commercial asset, being visibly, verifiably local is worth more in Liverpool than it is in many markets, and content that leans into it works.
Salford sits in Manchester's shadow in exactly the way Bradford sits in Leeds's, and the same opportunity exists. Businesses target Manchester and quietly ignore Salford, despite the search volume being real.
Across the North West generally, the pattern holds: the large city is contested, and the substantial secondary city next to it is not.
Nottingham, Staffordshire and Shropshire
Nottingham carries real search volume and a business base broad enough to support meaningful local SEO across a range of sectors.
Staffordshire and Shropshire are county-level opportunities rather than city ones, and they are a useful demonstration of why the county-first approach frequently wins. Both are large, largely rural, and served by businesses covering wide areas. Targeting the county directly matches how customers there actually search, and how the businesses actually operate.
Shropshire in particular has very little serious competition. It is not a large market and it will not transform a business on its own, but for a firm already operating there it is close to free visibility.
The Midlands as a whole rewards the regional-page approach: large service areas, dispersed populations, and customers who search by county at least as often as by town.
Essex, Hertfordshire and the East
Essex is a substantial market with a distinctive dynamic: it sits close enough to London that many businesses serve both, and the competitive picture differs sharply depending on which one you actually lead with.
A business positioning itself as a London firm that also covers Essex is competing in London's market, at London's difficulty, against London's budgets. A business positioning itself as an Essex firm is competing in a considerably emptier one. That is a strategic choice, not a cosmetic one, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by accident.
Bishop's Stortford and the Hertfordshire commuter towns are small but affluent markets. The volumes are modest; the value per customer frequently is not, and for the right kind of business that trade is a good one.
The commuter-belt pattern is consistent across the East: high household income, high expectations, and a strong preference for a firm that is visibly local rather than a London outfit driving out.
Newcastle and the North East
The North East is under-served in search terms, and Newcastle is the natural centre of it.
The volumes are more modest than the large Midlands and Northern cities, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What compensates is that the competition is correspondingly thin, which means the cost of achieving visibility is lower and the time to get there is shorter.
For a business already operating in the North East, local SEO here is among the more efficient marketing spends available, precisely because so few competitors are doing it seriously.
What does not work is treating the North East as an afterthought bolted onto a national strategy. The region has a strong local identity and customers notice when a business is clearly not from there.
Ireland and Waterford
Ireland shows the same fundamental pattern as the UK regions, genuine search volume, thin competition, with local particulars that need respecting rather than assumed away.
The practical differences matter. Eircodes are not postcodes and do not behave like them. The local directory and citation landscape is different, so a UK citation strategy does not transfer cleanly. And the distinction between the Republic and Northern Ireland is not a technicality: they are separate markets, separate regulatory environments, and frequently separate search behaviours.
Waterford and the regional Irish cities are markedly under-served. The volumes are modest and the competition is close to absent, which for a local business is a favourable trade.
Dublin is a genuine exception and should be treated as one. It is competitive in a way the rest of the country is not, and a strategy that works in Waterford will not simply scale up to it.
A note on how we build these
Every region above could have been forty pages, one per town, same words, name swapped. That approach ranked well for about a decade and now reliably gets domains classified as scaled content abuse.
So we build regional pages with genuine sections, and we only build a standalone town page when there is something real to say about that town: work actually done there, conditions particular to it, a response time honestly committed to.
It means we build fewer pages than an agency selling you volume. It also means the pages survive, which is the only version of this that is worth paying for.