Keyword Research: Finding Local Intent

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

If you’re a local, brick-and-mortar shop, local SEO is incredibly important; a few years ago ComScore found that almost 75% of local searches on mobile devices resulted in an in-store purchase. As with more traditional SEO, local SEO starts with keyword research. It forms the foundation of almost every on page and off page optimization you do going forward. If you’re a local business, or even a large chain with multiple locations, you need to tailor your keyword research to build a solid base for your local SEO.

In this piece we’ll go over how to find keywords relevant to your site and audience, and how to make sure those keywords are relevant to local searchers.

Local Keyword Discovery

Before you start digging into data like local search volume, click through rate (CTR) and competitiveness, go through the process of keyword discovery. Don’t worry about whether or not these keywords are specifically local keywords, we’ll cover that in a minute.

Just like with traditional keyword research, start with the keywords people are already using to find your website. Use Google Search Console’s Search Analytics report and filter the data by queries. Add in the columns for impressions, CTR and position to make sure you’re looking at your top keywords.

You probably won’t end up targeting this list. Think of it more as answers to the question, "what type of business do you own?", or a list of topics covering your website content. If you’ve got a landscaping business in San Francisco’s South Bay, for example, your list at this point might look like:

• Landscaping
• Home landscaping
• Business landscaping
• Landscaping design
• Gardening services

Once you’ve come up with a list of topics, it’s time to generate a list of keywords for each. These are the keywords people will actually type into a search engine to find your site. You don’t need to come up with a list of every possibility, just a few places to start further research.

Start with one of the topics you just came up with and brainstorm a few keyword ideas. What would you enter in a search engine to find your business? This is where the "local" part of “local keyword research” comes into play. Start by appending geographical areas that you serve. So, for the “landscaping” topic for our Bay Area landscaper, you would come up with a starting list of keywords that looks like this:

• landscaping San Jose
• landscaping Palo Alto
• landscaping Santa Clara County
• landscaping Sunnyvale
• landscaping South Bay

If you’re having trouble deciding on where exactly your audience is located, dig into your analytics. Under Geo in the Audience section of Google Analytics, select Location. Drill down by clicking on your country and state. Set your primary dimension to ‘Metro’ or ‘City’, depending on the size of your business.

There’s no real target number of keywords to come up with. If you’ve got a small site with just one physical location or a small service area, you’ll need a lot fewer keywords than if you’ve got a large site or a business that has multiple locations.

Expand Your List

Google Suggest is a great place to start when you’re looking to expand your keyword list, and is an excellent source of longtail keywords. If you want, you can do this manually by checking the bottom of the first page. This is a good way to go if you’re a small business with a pretty simple website, but isn’t very efficient. Luckily, there are plenty of free tools out there that will leverage suggested searches for you. Tools like Ubersuggest and Keywordtool.io work by appending every letter of the alphabet to your keyword and recording the suggestions. Keyword tool Answer the Public also includes question modifiers (how, where, who, etc.) and prepositions (for, to, with, etc.). Export your list of potentials as a .csv for easy analysis and use with other tools.

In Google AdWord’s Keyword Planner, search for the local keywords from your list of topics you came up with earlier. You can enter multiple keywords as either a comma or paragraph-separated list or by uploading a .csv file. Click on the Ad Group ideas tab to find ideas for related keywords. You will need to create a free AdWords account to use this tool.

Go over the search volume trends graph at the top to see how seasonality might affect your traffic. Our fictional landscaping business could start a campaign in December so they’ll appear at the top of search results when the season starts.

Trim Your List Down to Size

By now you’ve probably got a pretty sizable list of keywords — likely more than you should actually target. You’ve also probably got some keywords in there that don’t generate enough traffic to be worth targeting. It’s important to weed some of these out since local search volumes are generally already quite low.

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by Maria Lopez via SitePoint