I was reading Matt McGee's excellent post on local search queries when I was researching for my local search in the UK post.

Whilst it isn't relevant for the UK (Craigslist exists in some UK localities but hasn't taken off), I was spurred to do some research to find the answers to similar questions in the UK, because it is of interest for our local SEO clients.

Using Keyword Discovery, but restricted to the UK Database, I checked on 7 places in the UK of varying sizes to see what the top queries were using the city/town name. These are the results that I discovered correlated between the cities using the top 20 results.

1. Football Club (I should have seen that one coming given the conversations in this office on a Monday morning)
2. Airport
3. University
4. Hotels
5. Jobs

Other correlations included venues (e.g. arenas, cinemas and theatres), tourist destinations, and local news sources (e.g. newspapers).

What is perhaps curious is that although these searches have local intent, they very much reflect searches from people who are not currently located in that local area. People coming to the airport, to the university; who need a hotel when visiting. Football Club searches may not at first appear to have the same sort of intent, but away supporters use the opposition sites for finding venue information too.

P.S. I also read Search Engine Tigers' older post on a similar subject and can only conclude that Overture data is very different or that people have changed searching behaviour a lot in the intervening 16 months!