Hi and thanks for clarifying the 'plurals' thing for me.

I'm not turning up any search results for monmouthshire or monmouth either (1.2/day overture for monmouthshire mortgage, 0 on wordtracker).

Looks like people use 'wales' or 'south wales' more often (6.1/day & 21/day for overture and wordtracker respectively).

Would I be better off optimizing for 'mortgage broker wales' ?

I also looked at 'south wales' which in some cases gets more searches but there is also more competition in terms of no. of sites returned.

Is it better to go for a less searched term with fewer competition so long as the amount it is searched is not an order of magnitude less or worse? Isn't that a niche of sorts?

Cheers
Steve