We’ve compiled a list of 5 keyword research techniques for local SEO so you can see an uptick in your sales. Keyword research is a cornerstone of effective SEO, particularly for small business owners looking to enhance their online presence.
- Products, Services, and Locations
- Pinpoint Relevant Local Keywords
- Research Competitors’ Keywords
- Assess Local Metrics
- Attach Keywords to URLs
The Importance of Keyword Rsearch in Local SEO
Keyword research is a cornerstone of local SEO, as it determines how well your business can be found by potential customers in your area. By identifying and understanding local keywords, you align your content with the specific search intent of your target audience. This not only enhances your visibility in localized search results but also ensures that you attract customers actively seeking your products or services.
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Relying on guesswork when selecting keywords can be detrimental. An unfounded approach might lead you to target terms that don’t resonate with your audience, resulting in wasted resources and effort. On the other hand, a research-based method allows you to create highly targeted landing pages that address your customers’ needs. Moreover, it equips you with insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling you to tailor your offerings and marketing strategies effectively.
By investing time into keyword research, you lay a solid foundation for your local SEO efforts, ultimately driving more qualified traffic to your website and increasing your chances of conversion.
Let’s get to the real stuff on keyword research… Ready local business REBELS?
Implement These 5 Keyword Research Techniques
1. Products, Services, and Locations
As a small business owner dedicated to enhancing your visibility, it’s essential to articulate the specific solutions your business provides for your ideal customer and the locations you serve. This information not only drives your keyword research but also helps in optimizing your local SEO strategy.
When starting to perform keyword research, begin by detailing the products and services you offer. Consider how these products and services are solving your customer’s problem. Be specific and clear when writing your website copy.
For example:
- Consulting Services: Business strategy, financial planning, or marketing advice.
- Product Sales: Items you sell, from retail goods to digital downloads.
- Maintenance Services: Repairs, installations, or cleaning services.
- Educational Workshops: Training sessions or online courses that equip customers with new skills.
Next, pinpoint the specific locations in which you operate to help your keyword research. This can include:
- Towns or cities where your business has a presence.
- Counties or regions your services cover.
- States where you are legally registered or physically operate.
By thoroughly documenting your services offered and identifying relevant location-based keywords, you create a solid foundation for impactful local keyword research. This approach makes it easier for potential customers in your areas to find and choose your business over competitors.
2. Pinpoint Relevant Local Keywords
For small business owners, utilizing relevant local keywords can significantly enhance your online presence. These keywords attract users with local intent, meaning they’re searching for services close to them, which can lead to higher conversion rates. When a user searches for “organic grocery stores in Upper East Side” or “pizza delivery in downtown Chicago,” they are often ready to make a purchase, as they’re looking for options in their immediate vicinity.
This means you need to be ready for them to find you by performing detailed keyword research.
Local keywords generally face lower competition than broader terms, making it easier for your business to rank higher in search engine results. For instance, a term like “emergency HVAC repair in San Diego” is more niche and targeted compared to just “HVAC repair,” allowing your business to stand out in a crowded market.
To effectively identify and expand upon these local keywords, tools like Google Keyword Planner and Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool are invaluable for keyword research. They allow you to enter seed keywords related to your business and provide data on search volume, competition, and related local phrases. By performing localized keyword research and incorporating them into your content, you’ll attract more relevant traffic and improve your chances of converting casual browsers into loyal customers.
Need some inspo for marketing tools? Here are 10 Local Marketing Tools You Should Start Using to get to and stay on the local 3-pack.
3. Research Competitors’ Keywords
Start by identifying key competitors in your niche—businesses that cater to the same target market within your locality. For instance, if you’re a local bakery, competitors might include other bakeries and cafés within your geographic area.
Utilize keyword tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs for a thorough keyword analysis. Enter your competitor’s domain into these tools to extract valuable insights regarding the specific local keywords they target. Look for local modifiers in their chosen keywords, which often include geographical names, neighborhoods, or terms like “near me.” An example could be “best bakery in [Your City]” or “fresh bread [Neighborhood Name].”
By examining competitors’ keywords, you can uncover patterns in their strategies, gaining a better understanding of what resonates with your shared audience. This approach also aids in optimizing your own Google Business Profile, ensuring you’re utilizing effective keywords within your business description and posts to improve visibility in local search results.
Make sure to document the keywords you find, as they can provide inspiration for your own local SEO efforts!
4. Assess Local Metrics
When optimizing for local SEO, ensuring that you’re targeting the right keywords is crucial. Here’s how you can efficiently evaluate local SEO metrics using tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush.
Start by conducting keyword research with Google Keyword Planner, where you can find search volumes for your chosen local keywords. This tool allows you to enter specific terms related to your business and see how many searches they receive on average per month. Pay close attention to metrics indicating keyword difficulty, which reveals how competitive a keyword is—helping you identify whether it’s worth pursuing or if you should opt for a less competitive phrase that still attracts relevant traffic.
SEMrush is another strong option that not only provides search volume and keyword difficulty but also offers insights into your competitors’ rankings. By analyzing how competitors rank for certain keywords, you can identify gaps in their strategies. This will help you optimize your local SEO by targeting those underserved areas. Increased knowledge about your competition is invaluable, as it can reveal opportunities for content creation and keyword targeting that may bring additional traffic to your site.
Finally, remember that local SEO is not a one-off task. Regularly monitoring your local SEO rankings allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your strategies and adapt as necessary. As consumer behavior shifts, staying ahead of the curve will help you maintain and improve your visibility in local search results.
5. Attach Keywords to URLs
Making sure your keywords are attached to specific URLs is a crucial step in optimizing your website for search engines. This process ensures that each keyword aligns with a relevant page on your site, satisfying user intent and preventing keyword cannibalization.
Here’s how you can effectively attach your keywords:
- Generate a Keyword List: Start by compiling a comprehensive list of keywords relevant to your business. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or SEMrush to identify keywords with good search volume and low competition.
- Understand User Intent: Analyze the intent behind each keyword. Are users looking for information, making a purchase, or seeking local services? Understanding whether the intent is informational, navigational, or transactional will help you determine which pages on your site should be optimized.
- Assign Keywords to Specific Pages: Each keyword or keyword phrase should correspond to a unique page on your website. For example, if you run a local bakery, you might have separate pages for “wedding cakes” and “birthday cakes,” each focusing on specific keywords.
- Optimize Webpages: Enhance your pages to rank better for the assigned keywords. This includes modifying page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and content to include your target keywords naturally.
- Monitor and Adjust: Regularly review your rankings and make adjustments as needed. Use analytics tools to see how well your pages are performing for their respective keywords and refine your strategy accordingly.
By following these steps, you create a well-structured SEO strategy that boosts your search rankings and aligns your web pages with user intent, ultimately enhancing your local SEO efforts.
Overview of How Keywords Drive Organic Traffic
By aligning specific keywords with user intent, businesses can optimize their content to meet the needs and questions of their target audience. This process not only improves SEO rankings but also plays a vital role in ensuring that visitors find relevant information, ultimately driving more traffic to the site.
Matching relevant keywords to corresponding web pages is essential for satisfying user search queries. When each page is tailored to a particular set of keywords, it creates a clear and coherent experience for users, making it easier for search engines to serve those pages in SERPs. This targeted approach also mitigates the risk of keyword cannibalization, where multiple pages compete for the same keywords, potentially damaging the overall performance in search results.
In summary, a well-structured keyword research strategy enhances organic traffic by focusing on user intent, aligning keywords with content, and establishing a clear hierarchy that benefits search engine visibility.
How RebelFish Local Does Keyword Research for Local SEO
Anytime we onboard a new client, we have an intake form we use to ask questions about their services and products before we begin keyword research.
We use that to start getting into the head of the potential customers who are searching for the products and services that particular business offers. We have to know what they’re searching for and how they’re searching.
We never assume we know what we think we know, so we ask all the questions we can to ensure we’re using the best top keywords to bring them traffic.
Some of the Questions We Ask:
This is by no means a complete list, but here’s a jumping-off point for you to consider.
- What do you do?
- What is your most profitable service or product?
- How do you solve your customer’s problem(s)?
- Who are your top competitors? What do they offer?
- What do your competitors rank for?
- What do you think you should be showing up for on Google? (This gives us a starting point for our research)
Asking a lot of good questions helps with the keyword research for local SEO. It will help narrow things down for you.
One of the things that we do first is search for their keywords on a national scale. The reason is to get an idea of the volume percentage between certain keywords.
This article will use examples from some of our recent and long-time clients when we did research for local SEO for them. These businesses were a new tattoo shop business and dental practice. Let’s start things off with the tattoo business.
Once I’m finished looking into the national and local keyword search results, I look at what the intake form says, what the client said they expect to rank for.
Then I look at the categories that Google Business Profiles (GMB) supplies for the local business. The reason for that is that Google is mostly on the local side.
3 Primary Ranking Factors (and a 4th for good measure):
- Business name
- Title tag
- Primary category in the Google Business List
- First 10 reviews
Getting the first 10 reviews is critical for any business. A new business should get over 10 because getting over 10 creates the biggest impact, and then they need to keep gathering these consistently every month.
You can view the guidelines for representing your business on Google. They never tell you exactly what ranks, but they always give you some indicators of stuff you should be looking at, like the four big factors we’ve listed above. There’s a lot more to it, but those are the things you should worry about as a local business owner. It’s nice to have at least some place to start with information about what to do and what not to do.
Three of them, you can set it up quickly, and then the fourth, getting reviews, you have to have a strategy and a process and execute that every single month, every single week.
Next, I look at local competitors. I researched all the categories that they’re showing up for, and then I cross-match those findings. (the different sets of categories). Sometimes long-term businesses haven’t been optimized, and sometimes they have been.
I look at the three different competitors, and I cross-match all their categories to see which are the top percentages, and we use a tool (list of tools below) that allows me to see the percentage of traffic to the different categories.
If you’re already confident your website has all the necessary SEO bells and whistles but you’re wondering if there’s anything else you could be doing, check out The Magic of Service Area Pages, for some fresh ideas to further increase your authority.
The Importance of Proximity in Local SEO
In addition to the ranking factors above, the proximity of the search to the business is very important. Local search can greatly benefit small businesses, as nearly half of all Google searches are seeking local information. Failure to optimize your business for local search may result in missed opportunities for potential customers who are ready to shop in your area. Local SEO is an important aspect to consider to ensure your business remains relevant, and keyword research for local SEO is a part of that.
A Spot on the Coveted 3-Pack
In terms of LOCAL, you want those proximity searches because that’s where the money will be made. The 3-pack is so important to local businesses because they’re late in the buying cycle. It means someone is looking for something very specific and wants what they wanted yesterday. So, due to that urgency, having a place in the 3-pack is worth its weight in gold.
The proximity to the business is critical, and to map out and expand all around that business, all the available keywords that Google allows.
So when you start with the categories, that gives you an idea of what Google is saying is valuable. If Google says a tattoo parlor is valuable because it’s an actual category, that means a lot of people type it into the search engine.
The Tools We Use for Keyword Research
- Keyword Finder
- Keyword Planner
- Good old-fashioned manual keyword research
That last one, about the old-fashioned keyword research… If you type in ‘tattoo shop near me,’ there will be suggestions for other related searches below. That is a clue from Google that tells you these are search queries that are being done, are relative to your business, and you need to consider using them as keywords. It’s also an easy way beyond local SEO to get additional keywords or topics for which you need to be writing articles. At least, eventually. Writing articles and blogs is not necessary when you’re starting to build out your website. But it is important that you make that a priority at some point.
In general, the order you want to use for manual keyword research for local SEO is the following:
- Look up the categories for the competitors.
- Match those against your intake form from the client, both for their keywords and the keywords they feel are their competitors.
- Use a keyword finder or other tool to measure the search volume.
- Match those to determine the top 5 keywords.
- Use that information to optimize your Google Business Profile.
Then, optimize your website and the service pages based on the categories. Here are some additional tools we love to help you with your keyword research for local SEO!
A Secret Weapon for You!
But, is there a secret weapon, you ask? Well, yes and no. But, mostly, yes! One reliable secret weapon for keyword research for local SEO us has been this…
Complete your GMB profile, the title, and the primary category, and get those reviews. Then, using whatever categories you researched (say five), create an exact match page from the category to the website.
When the Google bots crawl your website and pages, it finds two exact matches, and they will then count you as more relevant than another dentist, specifically if they don’t have a service page or blog as your business does. While they may have a stand-alone page dedicated to teeth whitening, it may not be in-depth. Making your pages as in-depth as possible will make a massive difference in how Google ranks you regarding your authority. The more information you offer, the more authoritative you seem as a business and professional. That’s what you want, so keep that in mind when performing keyword research for local SEO!
Some people have such an aversion to having their teeth worked on that doing this well provides you with a major opportunity to make your practice stand out from the rest.
You’ll increase your authority if there’s a category to match on your website and GMB. Even if there isn’t a category to match, you can still rank, but it’s always better to match them up when doing keyword research for local SEO.
Now, obviously, the big boost will come with on-page optimization. Then, add reviews about teeth whitening to the page that is public and link back to the public review, and that’s another backlink that comes from the Google Business Profile that goes to the website. In Google’s eyes, this is authoritative and will shoot you up to the top of SERP, where you belong!
We know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed as a business owner, especially when you start doing keyword research for local SEO. With all the other things you have to do every single day… now you have to be an expert in local SEO too? It’s not fair, is it? We don’t think so, either.
Robert & Liz, RebelFish Local CoFounders, doing local volunteer work.We are RebelFish Local and are here to help you with all your SEO needs. Download our free resource for 5 Hacks That Will Get You On Page 1 Of Google today, and start climbing to the top of Google!