Keyword Research Tool For Local Customers
-
Hi all, and thanks in advance for your input.
I help mostly small local businesses with SEO and other IM strategy, but am having a hard time finding a good tool for local seo searches. For instance, I have a smaller plumber that covers Denver, but really wants to market to some of the suburbs.
What is a good tool to try to find search volume for "littleton plumbers" or similar searches? By the way Littleton is a suburb of Denver.
Thanks again.
Chris
-
Thanks John! It's exactly what I needed.
-
Hi Chris,
You've received some good suggestions here, and Matt's post at Small Business SEM is a good read on this. At the end of the day, there is currently no tool of which I am aware which offers a comprehensive or accurate picture of local search terms. This is something that comes up again and again in the Local SEO industry. I consider myself fortunate to be in daily contact with some of the best Local SEOs on the planet, and basically, the suggested process for doing keyword research for local businesses is this:-
Perform keyword research as though Local was not your goal. Just use your main keyword terms (plumber, plumbing, leaking faucet, toilet overflowed, etc.).
-
Make a big list of these terms.
-
Then, go in and add your core Local terms (city, region, zip code, etc.) to each of the terms.
-
If you are working with clients in a region of the country where there are unique language variants, explore these with the business owner. For example, a Canadian plumber may say 'hot water tank' vs. the 'hot water heater' of the USA. Keyword research tools may not show you these variants because their data isn't coming from the targeted geography of the business. So, discover regionalisms and make sure they are being given preference, as this is the way your client's customers talk and search.
You will end up with a big list of terms to work with from this process. Hope this helps!
-
-
Yupp, make sure you check the keywords trends with the help of Google Insight. Will really help you find some really good local keywords.
-
Hey Chris-
Have you tried Google Insights? http://www.google.com/insights/search/
It's pretty good for narrowing in on specific geographies. The only real issue is lack of suggested keywords using this tool. But if you know some you want to compare, this works great.
-
Thanks John, really appreciate the tips!
-
Hi Chris,
Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery are the three tools I most regularly use for finding search volumes for local search terms. If you can afford it Hitwise will give you the most accurate information, but this is out of most people's budget so not usually an option (I only include it to be thorough).
Here's a reasonably useful post for finding local search terms, that might give you a couple of ideas and help you figure out the best terms for your client:
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/local-keyword-research/1787/
Hope that helps : )
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Structuring sentences after keyword research
Hello, Once I have done your keyword research is there way to write other than "naturally" which is what everyone says ? Could someone explain what they mean by naturally. For example let's say my keyword is Piedmont bike tour, some of the words I find through my research are cycle, routes, piedmont, barolo, wine etc... Is there a way to integrate those so that google understands what I mean. I imagine that google parses sentences for s reason and imagine that if I only sprinkle those words like in the sentence below it won't work. Piedmont bike tour, cycle, routes, piedmont, barolo, wine all this is cool ! Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Example of secondary related keyword
Hello, Can someone give me an example of primary and secondary related keyword for the keyword "Provence bike tour " ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How to perform keyword research for Innovative products?
Hi Mozzers, I am doing an SEO audit for a new client that has an innovative product in the shoe industry. The terms he uses to qualify his shoes don't get searched that much. Digging in into his google analytics I found some potential kws that has a small amount of traffic that he is already ranking for. So my question is how should I conduct my kw research for an innovative product that is new to the market and no competitors to analyze from? Thanks for providing any tips and/or suggestions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Keyword phrase for entire site
Hey everyone! I'm fairly new to SEO but I have a large number of sites I'm needing to SEO. I'm a tad confused as to how many keyword phrases I should use throughout my site. For example, my site is www.uluru.travel. I want to rank highlight for the phrase 'uluru tours' throughout the site, as many of my pages list uluru tours and people searching for this phrase are my type of customers. As you can see I've tried to do some basic on page SEO for that phrase by including it in page title, headings etc. But the entire site doesn't seem to rank very well. Would you guys suggest trying to target 'uluru tours' phrase throughout the entire site of just focus a couple of pages on this term? Any advice is greatly appreciated guys! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mysites0 -
404 in google webmaster tool
I have redesigned my website with new web address over 6 months ago and in the google webmaster tools it still shows my old urls with a reponse code 404 and still crawls those pages. How do I make sure they don't appear anymore in the webmaster tool and don't get crawled anymore ? or should I do a re-direct ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Optimising a page for multiple keywords
I remember reading a question a while back about seo for a page targetting multiple keywords but I'm blowed if I can find it now.... I have a page which is optimised for one phrase and want to add 5-6 phrases/keywords... obviously I can't stuff the all the keywords in the page title or the header 1 tag. So I have written the content to mention the other keywords trouble is not wanting to compromise the quality of the page so of the keywords/phrases I have only been able to use once in the content. I assumed as the phrases are all on the same topic/area that this should not really matter. Apart from link building with the correct anchor text is there anything else I should be doing? The other option is to create custom pages for the keyword but again I am not keen on this idea.... Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Help needed on Google Webmaster tools
Hi I notice that one of my oldest sites , even if I put hundred of backlinks (good or bad) google webmaster tools never index more like 20 per day. Why is this happening? They control it? I mean they dont let them all to get indexed and they take it slowly slowly? If I put just 20 per day is the ideal link building amount? Thnk you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Why our site dropped in rank for a main keyword
Hello, Our site nlpca(dot)com dropped in rank for a few terms, including the main term "NLP". Could you look at our site and tell us what might be the cause? Thank you so much, Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0