SEO Help Needed & Help With Geographic Targeting

You have no problems at all I live in Adelaide as well and run local / aus wide stuff that is not an issue for you.

But do not bother doing keyword research in MS, just get your keys from G then paste that into MS to analyse

are they geo tergeted keys, my business adelaide or generic my business ?

you should have australia selected in MS that should give you a rough idea, and its possible there is few more keys you could be firing for so do some digging.

not that I am aware of / but it may do

I am not sure there is a magic bullet but if they are low competion keys then look around at what the others are doing here in the seo tips threads. / and or employ some of the seo services offered here

Howdy ... I run an internet marketing firm that specializes in "local" internet marketing internationally. So lets start with the easy questions.

"I use market samurai for my keyword research. Is it possible to use this program to search for Australian results as opposed to say American SEO competition etc?"

- Whether or not its possible is irrelevant. The best thing you can do for your friend would be to create a PPC campaign that targets his keywords + location (phrase and exact match only). As a general rule we create 2 campaigns ... one that is geographic focused in a broad area and another that uses more general keywords but in a very defined geographic area. This will provide you with all the research you need especially from a keyword optimization perspective.

"I would also like to know if .com.au would play a role in helping for his keyword to rank locally?"

- 100% ... if your friend is only targeting local AU clients than you only need the .com.au URL ... I would probably recommend just picking up the .com as a safe keeper but would put the site on .com.au

"My next biggest concern is my strategy for getting this website into the top 10 reasonably quick."

- So ... I have 10+ years of experience and I can tell you the single most fastest way to get a site to the top ... especially for a local business, would be to get a keyword rich domain. For example if your mate is based in sydney and has a window cleaning business and you test this in PPC his best keyword phrase is probably "sydney window cleaning" if you can get sydneywindowcleaning(dot)com(dot)au and throw a few high value anchor text links at the site for that phrase you will debut in positions 1-3.

I have done this time and time again ... even for highly competitive phrases I got #2 in 3 weeks.

Just a quick disclaimer ... I only use wordpress for web development. My experience has been its pure stupidity to use Joomla or Drupal for local businesses. Doing so can add significant delays to being indexed and ranked in the SERPS.

Use Google adword to find keywords in Australia.As far as local rankings are concerned. Some of my suggestions are:
1) Set target country as Australia in Google Webmaster tool.
2) Register in Google places and get it optimized as well (through reviews etc) .
3) Register in Yahoo local.
4) Submit the site in local directories.
5) Publish press release and target you country (many PR sites have this option).
6) Get links from local sites (hosted on Australian ip) etc