How to Do Local Keyword Research Like a Pro

With more than a decade’s worth of experience in internet marketing, Ann Smarty is a real pro when it comes to the ins and outs of SEO and content. Here, she provides a guide to performing local keyword research.

Would you like to boost your local website’s online visibility? A well-organized keyword research process is your first step. Keyword research is fundamental to any digital marketing strategy, for both global and local businesses.

Why is keyword research important?

Keyword research is important for the following reasons:

• To create landing pages that focus on searchable words and phrases.
• To understand searching behaviors better and, overall, understand your target audience better.
• To find related markets to expand into, and/or refocus your products or services to.
• To discover more ways to attract target customers (through providing answers to their questions).

The anatomy of a local keyword

When it comes to local keyword research, we usually have to deal with a three-part combination: Core term + Modifier + Location

Knowing the basic structure of a keyword helps you better understand the process and the fundamental goal behind it.

Core Term

This is what you do or sell, at its “core”. If you are promoting a local hair salon, your core terms are “hairdresser”, “haircut”, “hairstylist”, etc. If you are promoting a law firm, your core terms are “lawyer”, “law firm”, “attorney”… Well, you get the idea.

Modifier

This is what makes your core term more specific, and hence less competitive. For example, these may be “best hairdressers near me” and “find a personal injury lawyer” (keyword modifiers are in italics).

Location(s)

These are the names of towns, states, counties, communities, your business is located in, e.g. “best hairdresser in Albany” and “find a personal injury lawyer in NY”.

With that in mind, let’s figure out how to identify all the parts here.

Step 1: Identify your core term(s)

Obviously your own judgment, as a business owner, is your first resource here.

What is it are you selling? And if you were in need of this product/service, how would you search for it?

If you provide digital marketing services, include this question into your ‘new client’ questionnaire.

To expand your own “seed” list, try searching Google and take note of what your competitors (or businesses in similar industries) put in their title tags. For example, here’s Google’s search result page for “hairdresser”:

A few Google searches will help you come up with alternative core terms to optimize your home page for.

Step 2: “Extend” your core terms with keyword modifiers

This is where you make your keywords “longer”.

Simply put, keyword modifiers make your overall keyword strategy more diverse, as you get to discover:

• Less competitive organic search opportunities (those you can get ranked for easier and faster)
• More ways your business can be discovered (e.g. through landing on a tutorial page and then proceeding to your product page)

There are a few powerful SEO tools that “extend” your core terms with keyword modifiers that are commonly searched together. These include Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Serpstat, and Kparser.

When it comes to keyword research sections of these tools, I cannot honestly recommend one over the other here as I use them interchangeably. Here’s a good comparison of best-known keyword tools to help you make a choice.

I do recommend signing up for as many free trials as possible when selecting your go-to tool, as all of those tools have different databases, so you are likely to discover more options when you run several of those.

All of those tools have some type of “keyword difficulty” metric, developed to help you make more informed decisions when selecting a keyword phrase for your site.

Keyword difficulty reflects the organic competitiveness of a search query. It is usually calculated based on the assumed “power” of top-ranking domains and pages.

By filtering out keyword lists by keyword difficulty you can find less competitive terms:

Ahrefs keyword list for “hairdresser” core term filtered by keyword difficulty.

Your competitors are also a good source of SEO insights. By looking at your competitors’ keywords and search positions, you’ll be able to discover some neat keyword ideas to steal.

Step 3: Organize your relevant keywords by search intent

Search intent reflects the user’s goal behind a search query.

Fundamentally, there are three types of search intent:

• Commercial (also referred to as transactional and high intent): This is when a user is ready to take an action (order or call for services).
• Informational: This is when a user wants to learn something, research their options, or find answers to their questions.
• Navigational: This is when a user wants to go to your site (these are search phrases that contain your brand or product name).

Here’s a good tutorial on organizing your keyword list by search intent.

You want to build some organic visibility for all of these queries, as not all customers come to your brand through searching for related products or services. They may land on your local guide, remember your brand, and then search for your brand name to finally buy something.

The more diverse your organic discovery is (the more paths you build from search to your site), the bigger your customer base is going to be over time.

Remember that your customer acquisition tactics are going to vary depending on search intent. More often than not:

• For commercial queries, you’ll want your primary landing page to rank. These are opportunities for a shorter sales funnel where the conversion may happen right away.
• For informational queries, you’ll want to engage your potential customer first. This is where being truly helpful aids a business in winning customers’ hearts first and then building a conversion later. This is also a good opportunity to attract contextual links: Bloggers and journalists use Google to find sources, so getting yours to rank there is the best way to get links organically.
• For navigational queries, you’ll want those website pages ranking in search results to make a good first impression, and on top of all, you want your site to rank #1 for those to ensure people who type your (or your product) name in Google will land on your page.

This is why adding an “intent” column to your keyword list is such an important step.

To organize your keywords, you can use a simple spreadsheet application, like Google Sheets, which can be dated (to turn into an actionable schedule) as well as integrated into your WordPress site through a plugin.

To help you out further, there..

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