The Ultimate Guide to Local Keyword Research Techniques

As a business online, you have to compete in the marketplace encompassing pretty much everyone else who can possibly offer similar products or services to the same customers. Some companies have an advantage, though, which is the ability to use local keywords and targeting to reach an audience with the unique selling point of “we’re right here.”

Many years ago, using local keywords was simple. All you had to do was use a place name somewhere on your page, and it worked. It was easier both because of how people used the internet, because of how few other businesses were also targeting local keywords, and because of how Google worked at the time.

These days, though, local keyword usage – and the research to find them – is a lot harder. There’s more competition, there’s less advantage from the search engines directly, and the general atmosphere surrounding online marketing has changed.

So, how do you handle local keyword research today? Here’s my step-by-step process, which I often use to great effect with my clients.

Step 1: Understand Why Local Keywords are Important

Truthfully, before you even begin, you have to know why local keywords are important. So, let me put it this way: how do you compete with Amazon?

For many businesses, the answer ends up being “you don’t,” and they fail. The widespread failure of mom-and-pop shops in towns across the country is a testament to this.

Those who want to compete need to find any advantage they can. Local keywords provide several of these advantages.

• They help convince local residents that you’re also local, so they feel an attachment and are more likely to trust you over an anonymous big box.
• They take advantage of Google’s algorithms, which are meant to help underdogs compete against those big boxes.
• They help you capture immediate transactional intent from customers who don’t have the patience, luxury, or time to wait for a delivery.

And, of course, they help you stand out to the people you can actually call customers. For many kinds of local businesses, there’s no such thing as a global stage. A lawn care company isn’t going to drive halfway across the country for a client who found them online, right? You have to capture the audience that can be useful to you, and often, local keywords are the only viable way to do so.

Step 2: Brainstorm Basic Keywords

The actual act of developing local keywords starts with coming up with all of your non-local keywords.

Take our lawn care company, for example. It’s fairly easy to start coming up with basic keywords for this kind of service provider.

Start by listing services and categories, such as:

• Landscaping
• Lawn Mowing
• Lawn Care
• Gardenscaping
• Hardscaping
• Leaf Cleanup
• Snow Plowing
• Sprinkler System Installation
• Lawn Maintenance
• Sod Delivery
• Lawn Reseeding
• Garden Mulching

Remember, too, that each of these can be multiple variations based on simple changes. I’ve largely listed them as verbs – the action or service provided – but noun versions like “garden mulch” and “leaf litter” work as well. Your goal isn’t necessarily to enumerate every single variation of every single keyword right now, though, so each keyword can be considered a category in and of itself.

It’s also important to make sure that most of these keywords are services or products you can actually provide. If you don’t install sprinkler systems, it isn’t very useful for you to create content that attracts people looking to get a sprinkler system installed, right? While you can get some small value from providing DIY information, it’s a second or third-tier piece of content, and you want to focus on first-tier content first.

Don’t forget that while you can certainly do all of this with a notebook and some thinking, there are dozens of keyword tools you can use to help out. You don’t have to laboriously do everything manually, and it’s often easier to get a comprehensive list of keywords and prune out anything you don’t offer than it is to try to list everything you do offer.

One hack to streamlining this process is to use Topicfinder. I created Topicfinder as a way to take a simple seed keyword or a competitor’s website and harvest pretty much everything they’re doing, including keywords, topics, titles, and pages. It vastly speeds up the early steps in topic research and helps you come up with ideas and perspectives you might not have thought of on your own. It can also help you find gaps your competitors aren’t covering and keywords that might be too well-covered to bother with quite yet.

Step 3: Match Keywords with User Intent

Once you have your list of keywords, it’s time to start matching up user intent with the keywords. After all, SEO isn’t just about what you offer to potential customers; it’s about what customers want from you and why.

You can consider reasons why they might want your products or services, pain points they’re seeking to solve, and similar rationales for searching.

• Custom Landscaping Design
• Weekly Leaf Cleanup
• Garden Supply Delivery

Generally, if a user is searching for a local business, there’s a reason for it. They want something right now and either want to go pick it up in person, shop in person to see things before they buy, or want it delivered same-day. Or, they want to shop with a business where they know their money goes to locals rather than people off in a penthouse somewhere.

I frequently mention user search intent, but I’ll recap here. There are five broad kinds of intent and many different forms of intent within those types. The five types are:

• Navigational, where a user searches a name to find the site for that brand.
• Informational, where a user searches for a product or service with the goal of learning more about it.
• Tutorial, where a user searches a product or service with the intent of learning how to achieve something on their own.
• Commercial, where a user searches for a product or service with the goal of comparing different options and providers.
• Transactional, where a user searches for a specific product or service with the goal of making a purchase or order.

All of these can be valuable in different ways. There’s overlap between them, and there are subdivisions within them, but this is broadly the way I’ve found best to think about user intent.

So, take a keyword like Leaf Cleanup.

• Navigational intent doesn’t really apply unless you have a brand literally named something like Leaf Cleanup Services LLC.
• Informational intent allows you to create keywords and content about what leaf cleanup services entail, such as how often they occur, what happens to the leaves, and if it’s necessary in the first place.
• Tutorial intent allows you to create content about the best tools and processes for cleaning up leaves, often with an angle like “this is all hard work so why not let us do it for you?”
• Commercial intent allows you to showcase your leaf cleanup services in comparison to competitors and explain why you’re the better value.
• Transactional intent allows you to promote a service page and get people to sign up.

One keyword can be spun off into five different topics quite easily, as you can see.

So far so good, right? Well, up until this point, the only nod we’ve had towards local keywords rather than general keywords is the fact that your business is probably restricted to somewhere local. So, how do we wrap local SEO into this?

Step 4: Consider and Include Local Factors

In my mind, there are three types or categories of local keywords. Using all three of them is important, and they all serve different but interrelated purposes.

The first category is the generic localization keywords. This is, at the simplest level, just adding “near me” to a keyword. “Leaf cleanup near me” is a perfectly acceptable local keyword, and it’s likely something that your customers are actively searching for because they know Google is going to give them a map with local businesses offering the service in proximity to them. It’s simple, it’s easy to incorporate into any piece of relevant content, and it hits Google’s algorithms directly.

The second category is simple location keywords. This involves adding geographic names and markers to your content. Things like:

• The name of the city you’re based in
• The name of the neighborhoods you cover
• Major street names
• Zip codes
• Nearby landmarks

These can all be useful. Someone looking for a business that does leaf cleanup in Salem will want to find you if you offer those services.

The third category is more nuanced and detailed local keywords. This is where you can leverage some creativity and try to hook people in ways that showcase that you’re truly local and not just writing generic content.

For example, if you know that your area has a lot of trees like oaks, walnuts, or sweet gum trees – all of which drop obstacles that can make raking, mulching, or mowing difficult or dangerous – you can incorporate keywords related to those trees. People who know they have a specific situation that traditional means won’t cover will see that you know about it and will inherently be more likely to trust you to handle it properly.

There are many different ways to come up with the second two kinds of categories. The keyword tools I linked above often have local keyword search options, which can help you find some of them, though they largely focus on the first and second categories. The third category generally requires more creativity and thinking about the pain points your local customers experience.

Step 5: Filter, Vet, Qualify, and Order Your Keywords

At this point, you likely have a fairly long list of potential keywords and combinations you can produce. So, it’s time to make content, right?

Not quite.

While you could just pick a keyword, write some content, and get to publishing, it’s not going to be your most effective strategy. Instead, you want to spend some time massaging your keyword list into a priority list.

Your goals are to:

• Filter the list to remove or cluster keywords that aren’t able to stand on their own.
• Vet keywords to make sure they make sense and are topics you can provide information about.
• Qualify keywords by identifying data about them, like monthly search volume, competition, and value.

All of this is then used to order your keywords in a priority list from the most valuable to the least.

Once more, many of the more common keyword tools can help by adding this data, though a lot of times, it’s all very broad-strokes data or might even be national data rather than local data, so you should figure out if the tools you use are worthwhile in that sense.

Step 6: Vibe Check and Produce Content

As one final step, you want to do a vibe check on the topics before you dig into working on them. Simply perform a search for your localized keywords and see what’s out there. Do you have prominent competitors you need to outdo, or are they basically open in your region? How stiff is the competition? There are all sorts of ways to quantify and measure this, but often, a fairly simple vibe check of seeing what exists and whether or not you think you can make something better is all you really need, at least for the small business level.

Topicfinder helps with this, too; since the topics it harvests for you come with data to help you determine how competitive and useful they are, you can shortcut a lot of the keyword research process if you give it a try.

Then, all you have to do is the hard part – actually producing relevant local content. But that’s a topic for another time.

If you have any questions about anything I mentioned in this article, please feel free to let me know! I’d be more than happy to help however I can.

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