Methodology

This page describes exactly where every number on the Local Market Index comes from, how each metric is calculated, and what the data cannot tell you. The current edition was built on September 10, 2026.

Sources

• Establishment counts come from County Business Patterns (CBP) for 2023, the most recent year published at build time, using the 2017 NAICS classification. Five-year comparisons use CBP 2018.
• Population is the total population estimate (table B01003) from the 2023 American Community Survey five-year release, for the same geographies. It includes people living in group quarters such as prisons and campuses, so a parish with a large institution (West Feliciana Parish and the state penitentiary, for example) shows a lower density than its household population alone would give.
• Boundaries are Census cartographic boundary files (1:500,000), simplified for the web.
• New Orleans neighborhoods use the City of New Orleans's occupational business license list and its Neighborhood Statistical Area boundaries with 2020 Census population.
• Search volumes and map-pack samples, used by the playbooks, the two tools and the "Local SEO in" section of each place page, are Google Ads data via DataForSEO and a sample of Google Maps results. They are described under Search data below and are not part of the Census tables or the CSV download.

Geography

The index covers 10 metropolitan statistical areas and all 64 parishes in Louisiana, using the metro definitions in effect for the 2023 data. Metro slugs use the principal city (for example /data/baton-rouge/); parish pages use the parish name (/data/east-baton-rouge-parish/).

Industries

Fifty industries, each a single six-digit NAICS code so that every count is comparable across places and years:

• Plumbing & HVAC contractors — NAICS 238220
• Electrical contractors — NAICS 238210
• Insulation & drywall contractors — NAICS 238310
• Roofing contractors — NAICS 238160
• Landscaping services — NAICS 561730
• Pest control services — NAICS 561710
• Law offices — NAICS 541110
• Accounting & CPA firms — NAICS 541211
• Insurance agencies — NAICS 524210
• Real estate brokerages — NAICS 531210
• Dentists — NAICS 621210
• Chiropractors — NAICS 621310
• Physicians' offices — NAICS 621111
• Home health care — NAICS 621610
• Assisted living facilities — NAICS 623312
• Veterinary services — NAICS 541940
• Full-service restaurants — NAICS 722511
• Hair salons — NAICS 812112
• Fitness centers — NAICS 713940
• Auto repair shops — NAICS 811111
• Hotels & lodging — NAICS 721110
• Remodeling contractors — NAICS 236118
• Cleaning services — NAICS 561720
• Auto body shops — NAICS 811121
• Physical therapy clinics — NAICS 621340
• Painting contractors — NAICS 238320
• Flooring contractors — NAICS 238330
• Moving companies — NAICS 484210
• Locksmiths — NAICS 561622
• Pool services — NAICS 561790
• Tire shops — NAICS 441320
• Used car dealers — NAICS 441120
• Towing services — NAICS 488410
• Property management — NAICS 531311
• Mortgage brokers — NAICS 522310
• Title companies — NAICS 541191
• Funeral homes — NAICS 812210
• Trucking companies — NAICS 484110
• Self storage — NAICS 531130
• Optometrists — NAICS 621320
• Counseling & mental health — NAICS 621330
• Pharmacies — NAICS 446110
• Child care centers — NAICS 624410
• Coffee shops — NAICS 722515
• Bakeries — NAICS 311811
• Bars & lounges — NAICS 722410
• Nail salons — NAICS 812113
• Spas & massage — NAICS 812199
• Pet grooming & boarding — NAICS 812910
• Seafood markets — NAICS 445220

Definitions

• Establishments: physical locations with paid employees, as counted by CBP. One company with three offices counts as three establishments. Businesses with no paid employees (most sole proprietors and many home-based businesses) are not in CBP.
• Density: establishments ÷ population × 10,000, rounded to one decimal. The headline metric.
• Rank: position by density among Louisiana metro areas (for metro pages) or parishes (for parish pages) that have a published count. Ties share the same rank and the next rank is skipped (two places tied at #3 are followed by #5).
• Percentile: the share of the other ranked places with a lower density. The top place is at the 100th percentile, the bottom at 0; places that tie on density share a percentile.
• Five-year change: the 2023 count minus the 2018 count, also expressed as a percentage of the 2018 count.
• State benchmark: the statewide density for the same industry and year.

Withheld data

The Census Bureau does not publish an establishment count for any place × industry cell with fewer than 3 establishments; the row is simply absent from the data. (We verified this: the smallest count that appears anywhere in the Louisiana data is 3.) The index treats such cells as not published: no number is shown or estimated, and the place is excluded from ranks and percentiles for that industry, which is why some industries rank fewer than 64 parishes. Every affected page says so.

Metro totals are taken directly from the Census metro tabulation and can be slightly higher than the sum of their published parish figures, because a parish with 1 or 2 establishments contributes to the metro total but has no published row of its own.

Metro areas and the five-year comparison

Metro definitions change over time (for example, St. Tammany Parish moved from the New Orleans metro area to the new Slidell metro area in 2023). To keep comparisons honest, a metro's 2018 figure is the sum of the 2018 counts of the parishes that make up the metro today. Where a metro's parishes were the same in both years, the official 2018 metro figure is used directly. If any parish in the sum had a withheld count in 2018, that parish contributed 0, 1, or 2, so the five-year change is reported as a range rather than a single number ("+30 to +36" in tables, "between 30 and 36 more" in the text). The same applies to a parish whose own 2018 count was withheld.

Known limitations

• CBP data is published about two years after the reference year, so the 2023 edition reflects conditions as of March 2023.
• Counts are establishments, not businesses or practitioners: a dental office with four dentists is one establishment.
• Businesses without paid employees are excluded from CBP, which understates industries with many solo operators (for example landscaping and hair salons).
• The density figures measure supply: how many establishments exist per resident. The playbooks, the two tools and the place pages add a measure of search demand from Google Ads data (see Search data), reported in bands rather than exact figures. Neither side says anything about revenue, quality, or whether a market is a good place to open a business.
• Population denominators are survey estimates with their own margins of error, which matter most for small parishes.

Search data

The Census tables above describe how many businesses exist. The Local SEO playbooks, the keyword pattern tool, the schema generator and the "Local SEO in" section on every place page add a second kind of figure: how often people search for those businesses. That data comes from a different source and follows different rules, set out here.

Where the volumes come from

Every search volume on this site is Google Ads data via DataForSEO: the US monthly search figure Google Ads reports for a keyword, pulled 2026-09-02. For each industry we priced its national keyword list plus the city-modified form of the head term for all 10 Louisiana metros (for example "dentist baton rouge"). A city's figure is the US volume of that city-modified keyword, not a geo-targeted estimate of searches made inside the city. Google groups word-order variants ("baton rouge dentist", "dentist in baton rouge") under one figure, so each concept is shown once and never summed.

Bands, not exact figures

Volumes are shown as one of six bands: under 50, 50 to 100, 100 to 500, 500 to 1,000, 1,000 to 5,000 and 5,000 plus searches a month. Google Ads volumes are rounded estimates that move month to month, and a figure like "1,300" reads as more precise than it is; a band says what the number can honestly support, namely whether a term is searched a handful of times or thousands of times. The exact figures stay in the research files and never appear on a page, in the tool data or in the download.

The "la" rule

Lafayette, Monroe, Alexandria and Hammond share their names with cities in other states, so the plain keyword ("plumber alexandria") includes searches meant for Alexandria, Virginia and elsewhere. For those 4 metros the site uses the "{keyword} {city} la" form ("plumber alexandria la") as the metro figure; the other 6 metros use the plain form. The keyword tool shows the plain form alongside with a warning.

"No volume reported"

Google Ads suppresses the figure for many keywords, especially health and emergency terms and most city-modified phrases: about four in ten of all the keywords we priced, and nearly eight in ten of the city-modified ones, came back with no number at all. Those show as "no volume reported", which means the term was priced and Google returned nothing. It is not zero, it is not a band, and it says nothing about how often the term is searched. The keyword tool's separate "not pulled" note means the phrase was not part of the research.

The map-pack sample

The "what the local pack looks like" figures (claimed listings, listings with a website, median reviews and rating, primary categories) come from the top 20 Google Maps results for each industry's head term in each of the 10 metros, sampled 2026-09-02. Ad rows are dropped. Each list is then filtered to real competitors by primary category, because a pack often carries off-category listings (a glass repair shop under "doctor", a hotel under "assisted living"); every playbook names the categories it counted and how many rows it excluded per metro. Shares and medians are computed on the real competitors only, and medians exclude listings with no reviews. It is a one-day sample of 20 listings, not a census of the market, and it is re-sampled at each yearly refresh.

Which pages are indexed and why

The site builds a page for every place × industry pair, 3,700 in all, and every one of them is linked and readable. Only some of them ask Google to index them. A place × industry page is marked index,follow when both of these hold: the Census published a count of 50 or more establishments for that pair, and the head keyword for that industry in the place's metro (a parish uses its metro's figure) is in a band of 100 searches a month or more, or has no volume reported. A reported band under 100 fails the test; a missing figure does not, because Google's silence is not evidence of low demand. Parishes outside any metro have no keyword figure and use the count test alone. Every other place × industry page carries noindex,follow and stays out of the sitemaps, so its links still count but thin pages do not compete with the ones that have something to say.

In this first release every place × industry page is held at noindex while the hub, place and playbook pages settle into Google's index; the rule above would index 301 of the 3,700 today and will be switched on in a later release. A short hand-kept override list can force a page in or out of the index regardless of the rule; it is currently empty. The full list is regenerated at every build.

Refresh schedule

The index is rebuilt once a year when the Census Bureau releases a new County Business Patterns year, and prior editions of the downloadable dataset remain available. The search volumes and map-pack samples are re-pulled at the same time, and the keyword pull date and sample date shown above change with them.

How to cite

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

The full dataset is available on the download page under a CC0 license.