A question about local longtail keywords

[GroundFloorSEO]

Hello all.  This is my first interaction with SEOmoz, and I am still in my learning phases.  I currently own a lawn fertilization company near Allentown, PA.  I do the site for myself, and I am ranked number one for organic lawn care for my cities.  My question may seem kind of elementary, but I just want to clear this up for myself.  I want to start a side business doing SEO, and from what I gather step one is keyword research.  I plan on building new sites to start as opposed to going in and fixing existing ones.  So, I've been reading a lot on how to do keyword research and so forth.  I will use my current business as a reference for my question.  Should my main keywords be along the lines of "lawn care" and "lawn services", and then the location specific stuff be seperate?  Or should my main keywords be "lawn care allentown, pa"?  I plan on running my business solely for local businesses, so I am not to interested in competing with the entire world for keywords.  I just wasn't sure how to differentiate my keyword research for local business.  I hope that question made some sense.  I am really starting to grasp the elements of SEO, but for some reason the keyword part of things perplexes me.  Thanks for any responses!

[EGOL]

I would make content pages for all of those.  Not chest-thumping market-speak content, but informative stuff that is targeted for lawns in your area. Demonstrate your knowledge - that builds credibility and gets a page in the SERPs for each of those services that you sell.

[GroundFloorSEO]

I agree entirely.  I am certainly just starting out here, so I am reading and constantly searching.  The biggest issue is the vast amount of knowledge out there, some good and some bad, but all disconnected.  I am also aware that targeting organic lawn care isn't getting me very far, but i'm still glad I at least got something on the number 1 rank :).  However, when I built the site, I knew nothing about SEO, and I haven't had my hands on it since I started learning.  I think my biggest issue right now is that I am doing all this research and learning, and there's more to read and more to learn, so I'm not actually "doing" anything.  I'm really trying to just get something started to gain some real world experience.  Thanks for the response!

[GroundFloorSEO]

Kane-

I must admit that since I am in the lawn care business, I do tend to lump some things in there.  We do lawn fertilization, aeration and seeding, tree and shrub treatments, and perimeter pest control.  I suppose I need to broaden my horizons a bit for seo.  My main focus is on the lawn fertilization side of things, so I tend to gear all of my questions toward that aspect.  I could also add some "city pages" to target traffic for the other areas in which we work.

[RobertFisher]

Ryan,

Casey makes a point, but I still think you are getting ahead of yourself. You have lawn care tips which no one searches on. However there are over 550K searches on Lawn care How To. You have to research your own site and see what needs to be done. For Allentown as a location add, there are no searches. That is just not a good thing to do when there are this many misses.

To go from where you are to providing SEO for others, you need to read all you can on this site and not be bothered to be wrong and ask questions. There is  a ton of knowledge on this site and others, avail yourself.

Hope we can help.

[RobertFisher]

Ryan, 
I think you are setting yourself up for problems if you base your business on what you have done with your lawncare company. The reason being that organic lawn care will not be nearly as competitive as others you will run into early. Here is what I would do:

First, ask the client what they believe people search on.

Second, most people will already have a site and your job will be to determine whether or not they need a new site. (In my experience most do). So those who have sites, look at where their traffic is coming from now. Look at the keywords in analytics that people are using. If there are a lot of not availables, that will produce a bit more of a problem. We are seeing up to 30% on some clients. (Use WMT for finding these).

Then take and do an adwords search utilizing broad and exact match. My reasoning here is that you will find different values from industry to industry and from term to term:

If you have a keyword that has 50K searches a month in broad and 500 in exact, you are not close on what people are searching on.(maybe rarely) But if you have say 50K broad and 20k in exact...ahh hahh.

Yes you can use other tools from  various vendors , but i still prefer Googel keywords tool first and foremost.

Every vertical will be different. Make sure you are also looking at on page, etc. and that all is done there.

Best

[CaseyKluver]

Here is a link to start, they may just provide lawn care, but look at all of these variations: http://ubersuggest.org/?source=web&query=lawn+care&language=English%2FUSA&format=html

I would make one page going after 1 set of keywords (though only 2 or 3 MAX). Never create more than one page that may compete with another page on your site.

You may have one page on lawn care Allentown, PA, and other pages on:

• Lawn care tips
• winter lawn care
• summer lawn care
• lawn care service
• lawn maintenance
• lawn care quote

Etc, etc... Some of those pages make since to combine on one page like "lawn care service" & "lawn maintenance". Just make sure it works for not just Google, but the user also.

[KaneJamison]

That's not quite right Ryan - Lawn care companies don't just provide lawn care, they also provide yard maintenance, shrub trimming, lawn treatment, landscape service, lawn mowing, yard service, edging, aerating, new sod lawns, weeding, and probably more services that I haven't thought of here.

See where I'm headed with this? Optimize a page for each of those, and don't just include the keyword 5 times - actually provide some unique content on each page that a site visitor would find helpful and makes your company look good.

Also, don't spend time creating pages for "lawn care Allentown" and "Allentown lawn care." Google knows they're the same and it will just look spammy.

[GroundFloorSEO]

To add to my question for local businesses-  I understand we should only optimize for a small amount of keywords per page.  This is great for sites that talk about a lot of stuff.  But, a lawn care company provides only one thing- lawn care.  So, can I make multiple pages that are optimized for the same keyword set?  How do I create content on other pages when really there's only a select number of keywords relevant to my business?

[GroundFloorSEO]

Great response, and thank you.  So basically, the research is to decide the best order or annunciation of particular words, ie. lawn services allentown vs. allentown lawn services.  So its geared more toward choosing one over the other, which I think makes perfect sense.  What do you do when you're not sure what keywords to start with?  For instance, I have a future client once I get established who operates a vehicle graphics company.  It could be labeled as vehicle graphics, vinyl car wrap, truck lettering, etc.  Do you use the same process for deciding which of these to use?  Just go by search volume and difficulty?  My biggest fear is optimizing for a keyword no one is searching for, and something like vehicle graphics often comes down to specific geographical area.  People in california may search for truck lettering, while people in allentown may search for vehicle graphics.  Any input on this, considering google doesn't get very location specific?

[CaseyKluver]

Hi Ryan,

The best place to start is obviously the Google Keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal . There are soooo many ways to to research and come up with keyword combinations, but for local keywords the Google keyword tool will be just fine as you usually arent targeting more than 20.

So lets take the word "lawn services" and "Allentown, PA" and combine them, now you have:

• Allentown PA lawn services
• Allentown lawn services
• lawn services Allentown
• lawn services Allentown PA

I usually start off with doing this for my initial "top of my head keywords", and also include any relevant surrounding cities. You can make a huge list like this easily in excel.

Plug these into the google keyword tool - make sure you select "Exact Match" from the left column.

From here you can now see the estimated search traffic - note, there has been some debate to how accurate this is, but you can still see what keywords are searched more than others. You can also see any related terms and ideas which are usually helpful in growing your keyword list. If you see a related keyword idea, do the same as you did before with the geo variations before and after.

Other tools which will help you come up with keyword variations before you plug them into Google Keyword tool:

http://soovle.com/

http://ubersuggest.org/

I hope this helps.