Dentist ads in Hobart, by opportunity

Search terms: a fixed keyword set per category, tagged generic, near me, urgent, service or adjacent, targeted to each capital city using a Google Ads city-level location code, not a text match. Adjacent keywords are shown in the keyword table but excluded from headline totals and medians.

Headline monthly searches is the mean of the last 12 months of the core keyword set (generic, near me, urgent and service keywords, excluding adjacent); the full 48-month series is shown on the chart.

Year-on-year change is total core-keyword searches in the last 12 months against the 12 months before that. For one city, it is that city's own totals (the two most recent 12-month blocks in the demand table). For a category page, it is those totals summed across all 9 capitals, not an average of each city's own percentage change.

Headline cost per click is the volume-weighted median of each keyword's mean cost per click over the core set, called "typical cost per click (median)" throughout. The top-of-page bid (what Google Ads estimates you need to bid to show near the top of the results page) is shown separately with its own label; the highest single-keyword cost per click is never the headline.

A keyword is flagged Volatile when its 24-month maximum is 2.5 times its minimum or more, or when a single month makes up 40% or more of its 12-month total. Volatile keywords stay in the totals.

Prices convert from Google Ads US dollars to Australian dollars at the US Federal Reserve's H.10 monthly average rate for the month stated in the header. Ranks compare cost per click (cheapest to dearest), monthly searches (most to fewest) and business density (fewest to most) across the same 9 capitals or 8 states and territories; a trend is only stated when the change is 5% or more.

Segments: each niche is tagged by how its own numbers pay back, not by guesswork. Quick cash clears its ad cost on the first job; Big tickets have the largest profit per job in the category; Client book pays back over 12 months of repeat visits. A niche can carry up to two tags, or none ("not proven on these numbers") if neither test clears the bar. Niches with no single job value (general/near-me keywords) sit in a shared pool instead. Within a segment, the card shows the niche with the lowest break-even call rate first.

Confidence: each niche also carries a confidence level (High/Medium/Low/None) for its weakest input among search volume, click price, job value and margin. High means the figure is sourced for this exact city or an official AU figure. Medium means it is AU-sourced but national or industry-level, not this exact city. Low means a single weak source, an overseas figure, or a US benchmark. None means there is no sourced figure at all, and the reader puts in their own.

Google rounds search volumes and estimates prices; treat small differences as noise.

The modelled figure on this page is "searches per business" in the competition section, which assumes category business density is even within a state, so a city's share of state businesses is approximated by its share of state population; it is the only number on this page tagged "(estimate)". The segment cards, niche table and plan are a worked example using example job rates (job size, call and booking rates, margin, hours and repeat work you can replace with your own), not a data model, so they are labelled "worked example" rather than "estimate". Every other figure is a direct read from the source cited in the data section.

Next refresh planned January 2027. Download the monthly data as CSV.