About the Local Market Index

The Local Market Index is a public reference showing how many local businesses exist relative to population, for 50 everyday industries, across every metro area and parish in Louisiana, with a street-level spotlight on New Orleans neighborhoods.

What it is for

People ask "how many dentists are there in Jefferson Parish?" or "which Louisiana parish has the most law offices per person?" more often than you'd think: business owners sizing up a market, journalists, planners, lenders, students. The answers exist in public Census data, but not in a form anyone can read in thirty seconds. The index turns that data into plain pages: a count, a density, a rank, a five-year trend, and a state benchmark for each place and industry.

The density figures measure supply: how many establishments exist per resident. The playbooks and tools add search demand from Google Ads data, shown as volume bands rather than exact counts, so you can see how crowded a market is and how often people search for it side by side. Neither figure estimates revenue or quality, and neither says whether a market is good or bad. Read the index as a map of what exists and what people look for.

Beyond the data pages there are 5 Local SEO playbooks (playbooks for the other 45 industries are in review), a keyword pattern tool and a schema generator built on the same data, and a findings page, published as The State of Local Business in Louisiana, 2026 edition, that sets out what the numbers show across the state.

Who builds it

The index is a project of WTF SEO, a New Orleans search-marketing agency. We built it because our clients are local businesses in exactly these industries, and we wanted a trustworthy, citable answer to the "how crowded is my market?" question that did not depend on anyone's sales pitch, including ours. The agency publishes the index at no cost and does not sell the data.

How it is built

Every number is derived from public sources, the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns and American Community Survey and the City of New Orleans open data portal, by an automated pipeline that is rerun each year when new Census data is released. The methodology page lists every source, every definition, and every known limitation, including how withheld data is handled.

Using and citing the index

The full dataset is available on the download page under a CC0 public-domain license. Pages may be quoted, linked, and embedded freely. Suggested citation:

The Local Market Index, WTF SEO, 2023. wtfseo.io/data/

Questions, corrections, or press inquiries: contact WTF SEO or call (504) 233-2660.