How To Do Local Keyword Research? [An Overview]

Succeeding in a startup business is hard since competition is growing and one must know how to do keyword research for a local business website that include short tail as well as long-tail keywords.

First Things First, less understand the true meaning of Keyword research-these is the most commonly used phrases by the user to search your website.

For example, let’s say you’re done owner of the Chinese restaurants in Delhi show the common keyword would be Chinese restaurant nearby me, restaurants that serve Chinese in Delhi, best Chinese restaurant in Delhi and the list goes on.

The process is to find out those keywords that are high in traffic valuation but low in competition.

By considering this too, you can get many productive SEO benefits that means ranking at the top pages in search engines and more visibility for your business.

Today, we’ll read:

☛ Why Is Local Keyword Research Important?
☛ What Are The Variations Of Keywords?
☛ Where do we need to implement keywords?
1. Analyzing your competition
2. List The Services You Offer
3. Use your site information
4. Check for local intent
5. Finding keywords for content
6. Check search volumes
7. Do Answer The Public
8. Group and map keywords to URLs
9. Look for ‘things to mention’

Let’s begin with it….

Why is Local Keyword Research Important?

Local keyword research is essential as you have to understand what people type in the search box of Google when searching for your business’s products or services.

The keyword might sound obvious, but when you actually think about them you can’t remember all of them.

The majority of people guest these keywords and think they know how people are looking for their business. This mostly ends up focusing on the wrong keywords or completely ignoring the keywords that could impact their bottom link in the correct light.

For example, if your garage door repair service provider is in Delhi, you would have probably figured out that you want to rank for effective focus keyword such as “garage door repair in Delhi”.

But what about all the other services that you offer?

Do you have any idea of how people search for those services?

These are the things that local keyword research helps to answer.

What Are The Variations Of Keywords?

The keyword plays an important role in the content of the webpage that makes it Frank and helps in creating an online presence.

In the absence of it, it is more like a pale article that is simply out of reach to your potential readers or customers.

There are two types of keywords that every dedicated SEO expert uses to optimize content, focusing on actual influential content writing.

● Short Tail Keywords:

These are phrases that do not go beyond two or three words.

Some of the great examples of a car wash, insurance service, five-star restaurant, Healthcare service, nearby petrol pump, etc.

The monthly search volume of these types of keywords is extremely high but the competition level is kind of adverse.

It is extremely difficult to rank at the top position by using this type of keyword and even more difficult to maintain the same result over the search engine.

● Long Tail Keyword:

when it comes to progressive semantic and long tail keywords, certain words related to geographical, taste, and preference, differentiation characteristics also add up.

The length of the keyword can go from 3 words to 5 or 6 words easily.

Please understand this by taking an example of short tail- car wash service in India, reasonable insurance services for adults, 5-star Chinese restaurant, Quick Health care service in Delhi, nearest petrol pump at night, etc.

The best strategy to adopt here is using both short tail as well as long tail to find out hidden keywords for your content.

This helps in optimizing your content by using the work of the phrases that improve your chance to rank.

Where do we need to implement keywords?

● Title tag
● Meta descriptions
● H1 tag (one per page)
● H2-h6 tags
● URL

The only thing that we would like to say here is that do not over optimize your content because that would create a negative impact.

Just make sure there is a positive impact of content writing. You need to make sure that you serve the purpose of search engine algorithm and User experience point of view.

1. Analyzing your competition

Simply use the keywords that your competitors use. It is likely that your competitor has already done the research and saved a huge amount of effort, time plus money.

If you have no idea where to begin then you must start from this one.

2. List The Services You Offer

First, understand the services your business is offering before starting to search for keywords. This is important to do no matter what you are doing, keyword research for a client or your own business.

Here is the process, you can consider:

a)- Ask or brainstorm

If in case, you are doing this for your own business, you should have in-depth information about the services you offer. Make a note in a document and move on to the next step. Here, reliable SEO specialist can help you a lot.

But if you are doing this for a client, it’s better to list the services they offer.

This is essential because many don’t think about the type of services they offer.

For example,

A baker might offer services like:

● Pastries
● Cake
● Muffins
● Donuts
● Cupcake
● And many more

But in their mind, they will just think about their profession: baker.

People are initially searching for “baker”, but many are searching for specific food items. This is why you need to understand everything offered.

b)- Expand ideas

Focus on expanding your ideas. It’s worth taking a minute to check for services you might have missed.

Listed below are some of the easiest ways to do this:

● Explore the ideas by searching in the keyword explorer
● Choose the country from the dropdown
● Go to the “Having same terms” report

This will represent all the queries from our database that hold all the words from your prominent SEO keywords. It is then just a case of skimming for solutions you might have missed.

For example, if you do this for plumbing-related solutions, we observe things we missed like “gas boiler installation” and “knob fixer”.

Important

Keep in mind that you are searching for services you missed here, not keywords you missed. Plus, you are not searching to find every possible manner someone might search for the exact same thing like:

● Baker
● Bakery Shop
● Baking service

You are just searching for keywords that get connected to the services.

Another manner to get “missed” services is to plug a competing site into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, and look for the URLs that map to solutions on the first page.

Check their site navigation as solutions will generally be listed there. To understand it properly read how to choose keywords for seo.

c)- Refine your list

If you are working with a client, suggest some ideas to ask if they offer those services or not. Include only the confirmed services on your list.

3. Use your site information

Analyze your product, business themes, and services first, and then research them online. You’ll be able to come up with phrases that people commonly use to search. Make sure that you include a location you serve and a unique selling proposition for your product and services.

4. Check for local intent

Local SEO is used to rank for keywords with local intent, meaning the people looking for them are expressly searching for local solutions.

Therefore the next step is to identify that people looking for these services need to shop locally.

If are located in the same area as the company you are doing credible keyword research for, the convenient manner to do this is to search Google for your solutions. Google will utilize your location to personalize the outcomes, therefore you can tell if there is a local intent by going through the SERP for two different things:

● Include a map
● Local business holding a good position in the organic results

For example, if you search for “bakery shop”, you will see a map that will help you to reach businesses in the search results.

If you search for “cake shop”, there is no map pack and none of the results are from local companies.

It looks like this keyword does not have local intent as well as that searchers are just wishing to purchase a cake shop to install on their own. Adding to that, you can search for keywords through user friendly free keyword research tools too.

If in case you do not live in the same location as the company you are working for, here we have mentioned some steps to check for local intent:

● Visit Google’s Ad Preview tool
● Enter your search term.
● Choose a location
● Click search

You should thoroughly go through a local SERP where you can identify local business rankings and the presence of a map pack.

5. Finding keywords for content

Articles or blog posts are needed to make people aware of what you are selling and what its advantages of it are.

We recommend at this stage that you seek the help of professional SEO content writing experts to come up with some great content ideas and optimize them for better ranking.

Just make certain that you find out keywords that are low in competition. This will get your traffic to get going at the initial stage of the business website. Later on, you can shift your focus to generating high-end phrases for high-volume traffic.

6. Check search volumes

Providing prominent local search volumes for local keywords is difficult because the majority of SEO tool only represents country-wise and global volumes.

But people think way too much about search volumes with better off page SEO techniques.

Even if your search volume for your service is low, you should develop a page about it for your visitors.

Let’s say in boiler installation.

Possibilities are there are some people who are probably searching for this in a small town. But this is the service you offer, you should create a page for it because it will be beneficial for visitors- including those who found you by searching something as broad as “Plumber” on Google.

Saying that now a question might arise here: why give so much importance to search volumes?

The answer is- so you know which webpages to value more in your local SEO efforts.

How will you get local search volumes?

Everything relies on whether you want to know the volumes for implicit or explicit keywords. Furthermore, all these things might made you understand why are keywords important.

Finding search volumes for implicit keywords

Implicit local keywords are the terms that searchers search for the local result while not mentioning their location in the search box.

Examples:

● plumber
● boiler replacement
● radiator installation

This is how the majority of people search for local businesses. After all, why bother typing such a huge phrase “plumber in New Zealand” when you get the same results as just typing plumber?

But here is a problem:

If you check volumes for implicit keywords in Keywords Explorer, the estimates you will get, will be for the entire country.

That would not be that helpful when it comes to local SEO provided by trustworthy local SEO company because you need to know how many people are searching for these implicit keywords in the area you serve.

How can we find that information?

Google Keyword Planner is the best tool you can ever get.

Listed below is the process:

1. Open Google Keyword Planner
2. Select the option to “Get forecasts and search volume”
3. Type your keywords or services
4. Set the location to your company’s area

You will see a list of monthly search volumes for implicit local keywords in your location.

Finding search volumes for explicit keywords

The keywords where the searcher explicitly mentions their location are called explicit local keywords.

Examples:

● Bakery shop in New Zealand
● Cake seller in Delhi
● Cup cake providers in Australia

If you observe that the implicit searchers for some of your services did not have local intent, this is the time you can include a location modifier to convert them into explicit searches.

For example, the implicit search “bakery shop” does not have local intent but the explicit search has:

Using explicit keywords, you can get relaxed on one thing you not have to rely on Google Keyword Planners as the query itself shows you the searcher’s location. Therefore you can use a keyword research tool like Keywords Explorer to get more prompt search volumes for your chosen keywords. To have more information to understand the topic perfectly, know why keyword difficulty is important.

7. Do Answer The Public

If you think that you have the capability to solve the issues an online customer is going through then why should not do it?

The problem-solving technique is a loss of a customer for your products or services and also generating for your business.

Concentrate on generic terms associated with the “why to” and “how-to” or “what are” type of auto suggestions because those are the important queries that readers or customers choose to search online before they make a buying decision.

8. Group and map keywords to URLs

Local keyword research is not only about identifying what people are looking for. It is also about knowing and understanding you will target those keywords.

The majority of the time, your homepage is not going to rank forever service you provide.

This is the reason why the majority of local businesses develop pages focused on a specific service.

Here, you can feel like things are getting a little confusing because it is not always easy to find out which services do and doesn’t need dedicated pages. In this case there is a good possibility of common small business SEO mistakes.

Services like these needs a separate page:

● combi boiler installation
● boiler installation
● oil boiler installation

It is not sure whether you need a separate page for oil boiler installation, combi boiler installation and boiler installation or whether you can rank for all these terms with just one page- “boiler installation”.

The most effective way to identify it is by checking the current top-ranking results for the keywords.

For example, going through the search results for “combi boiler installation”, you will find the page ranking in the top position is specifically about combi boiler installation, not just boiler installation in general.

So, it’s better to make a separate page for every service

If your page is not specifically about the gas boiler, you would probably don’t require a specific page for this service. You can try to rank for this as well as terms linked to it with a broader page about boiler replacement or installation.

If you are focusing on ranking, consider focusing on popular SEO trends to rank website.

Saying that it is worth noting down that there is some kind of nuance to this method and it is not that complicated as it might seem.

If you are not sure at any stage, just decide whether website visitors would find a page focused specifically on one service beneficial.

If you can add everything visitors need to know about that specific service on a broader page, you can drop the idea of creating a dedicated page.

9. Look for ‘things to mention’

Let’s assume that one of the services you provide is garage door repair.

How will you create a page that ranks locally for “door replacement” and terms related to that?

Here, many choose to do keyword stuffing. This is where you can find all the popular methods

Here’s an example:

This is the not right approach. It only makes your page not readable.

But while you should not stuff keywords, it is worth including appropriate things like relevant lsi keywords to mention for some good reasons:

● It can improve ‘topical relevance’. If a webpage about garage door replacement mentions the types of doors you can get, services, and prices, that will assist Google to understand the topic of your page completely and have confidence in ranking it at the top position.

● It can help you rank for long-tail keywords. Not everyone searches for something in the same manner. Many people might be searching for garage door repair service in Delhi, while others might searching for garage door repair service in New Delhi.

● It helps visitors. People searching for garage door repair services likely want to know what you provide and how much it will cost.

Here are some ways to do this:

1- Check keyword rankings for similar pages

Go to Google and search for one of your services and find out the top-ranking page from a local business.

Here, you can also use potential SEO tips for organic traffic.

Plug that URL into Site Explorer, view the organic keywords report, and note down the top 10 rankings.

Going through these keywords will showcase things you might want to mention on your webpage.

For example:

The top-most ranking garage door repair service pages in Delhi also rank for:

● Garage door repair New Delhi
● Garage door repair Old Delhi

Although you do not want to include exact keywords in your webpage’s content, it likely makes more sense to highlight areas you serve on the page. This can assist you to rank for long-tail keywords and also increase the confidence of potential customers that you serve their area. Also, there are many other proven ways to build links.

The other things for what the page ranks include:

● Fixed price garage door
● Garage door repair
● Emergency garage door repair
● Garage door repairs

Therefore it seems like it is more beneficial to mention the types of garage doors, whether you offer good or fixed pricing, and whether you provide emergency call-outs.

It is worth repeating the process once again for every relevant top-ranking page to know what customers are searching for.

2- Check Top-Ranking Pages Manually

Even though there are some keyword research tools such as keyword explorer works on a heavy database, some local keywords are very rarely searched for tools to tell you.

This is the reason why it is worth going through the top-ranking pages from local businesses for things to mention.

For example:

Here are some things that are mentioned on a top-ranking page about garage door repair services:

● Garage door repair services near me
● Local experts

Even if you are only some people who are searching for garage door repair service in Delhi every month, highlighting these terms on your webpage will assist to update potential customers, increase trust, and probably generate more business which is the major aspect of local SEO. This will also give you major advantages of SEO.

If you want to guess, you can use the Also talk about report in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. This will help you know the keywords and phrases the top-ranking pages for your target keyword randomly mention.

3- Check for common questions

People who are looking for your services likely need some questions answered before they hire you. Therefore, it’s absolutely worth searching for these questions and answering them on your page.

There are some ways to do this.

The top-most method is to search for your service and go through the “People also ask” section in the search results.

This will highlight all the questions that searchers also ask on Google.

After this, the second method is to plug the service into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer as well as go through the questions report. This shows the top searched questions containing the service name

If any of these questions look like things that genuine customers might need to know before doing business with you, choose to answer them on your page.

It might sound a little difficult to achieve talk to you let me just tell you it is a most interesting and entertaining part of the SEO.

Just make sure that you do not under-optimize and over-optimize it because that’s where things get really tacky.

If done correctly, you’ll see its reward with increased traffic.

Conclusion:

Local keyword research is very beneficial and straightforward. But ensure that you create and optimize your Google My Business profile, optimize your website, establish local citations, consider reviews, and so on. Here, if you want professional help, LinkBuildingCorp is the one to turn towards.

We have a team of SEO experts who have expertise in the SEO field and can help you drive more organic traffic to increase your sales. Contact us at +91-9205356986 or mail us at info@linkbuildingcorp.com