Keywords local and national

[Jasonalanmagic]

Hello everyone.  I asked a similar question but still find myself a bit confused.  I am a magician who is trying to improve my web presence.  I found a list of keywords which I will list below.  The results read from left to right the search results in the United States, and in Ohio ( where I am from).  I found these results using google planner.

Magician 14800     390

Magicians 5400    170

Corporate Magician 170    10

Comedy Magician 140     10

Here is my question.  Lets use the word Magician as an example.  I see that there are 390 results in Ohio for the search term Magician.  Would I want to key the phrase "magician" or "Ohio Magician".  How does google work with this?  If I key just the word "magician" and someone in Ohio google searches for Ohio Magicians or something similar, will it detect their location and put me on there radar?  When I key in " Ohio Magician" in the planner the results that come back are 0 or less than 10.

I'm curious if google works on location and if I'm wasting my time keying in all of these cities that are showing no results.  I began targeting "Cleveland Magician" "Columbus Magician" etc.  Should I just stick with the main term Magician?

[MiriamEllis]

Good luck! So glad to be of help!

[Jasonalanmagic]

Awesome, thank you.  I'm considering targeting the main keyword on a national level and then zeroing in on the each individual city.  I am a national act and if I am able to rank for Corporate entertainment on a national level and local, awesome.  Thank you so much for the help.  I appreciate it.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jason,

Thank you for the additional details. To be honest, I have little or no faith in keyword tools for local research these days, so I wouldn't necessarily believe that no one in Pittsburgh is searching for a magician. It just isn't logical.

That being said, yes, you must create pages optimized for Cleveland to have a hope of appearing organically for relevant searches. You do have a chance, definitely! Create great content for your target cities and you do have a chance to gain organic visibility for these terms, though it will likely never outrank competitors physically located in these cities. You are understanding this correctly.

[Jasonalanmagic]

Miriam,

Thank you for your response.  That is very helpful.  Here is my current situation

I have established a local search marketing campaign.  I'm located in Akron Ohio.  I began by listing myself, which puts me right at the top of the list.  I then wrote solid content for terms such as Magician, Magic Show, Kids entertainer, Corporate etc including the term Akron.

I guess my real question is in regards to other cities in my area.  As I mentioned, when I search for the term Magicians ( generic no city after) I find results of 5,400 with a low competition rate.  This is great.  I'm interested in demoniating the market in Columbus, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.  When I place the term "Cleveland Magician" Or "PIttsburgh Magician" into the keyword planner I'm receiving a return of 0 searches.  BUT, if I change the targeting area to Cleveland and search just for the term " Magician" I'm getting a return of 10.

The question being this, do I still need to include the term Cleveland magician in a target pages which is trying to get me ranking in the Cleveland area?  Even though the results for Cleveland magician comes back 0 and magician comes back 10, how should Id approach this?  If someone in Cleveland search just for the term "Magician" would google recognize my targeted page of " Cleveland Magician", highlight the term "magician" and point them towards me?  I know the local magicians in Cleveland will rank better because they are local, but if I give good content, I have a chance.  Right?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jason,

Are you carrying out a Local Search Marketing campaign for the business? I'm assuming you travel to your clients to perform for them, right? And you do so within a certain geographic radius, I'm guessing. If this is the case, a campaign for you would typically look something like:

• You'd need to have a street address (even your home address) that you'd be using to create your Google+ Local listing and then following the options within the dashboard to ensure that the address is hidden to comply with Google's rule about SABs (service area businesses) hiding their addresses. If you're physically located in Colombus, then your Google+ Local page would display that you are based in Columbus, OH, without actually showing your street address. Google would then consider as you a most relevant LOCAL result for queries like 'magician columbus' or searches for magicians stemming from Columbus-based devices.

• You would also need to have a dedicated local area code phone number.

• In addition to building your Google+ Local page for your city of location, you would be creating listings (called citations) for your business in a number of other local directories.

• The main thrust of your website optimization would center on your service terms (magician, comedy magician, corporate magician etc.) + your city of location. So, in other words, if you're physically located in Columbus, you'd be optimizing the core pages on your website for 'Columbus Magician', 'Corporate Magician in Columbus', etc. I would consider this a much more typical way to handle the SEO for a local business than optimizing just for the state of Ohio would be. The point of all of the above is to earn high local rankings for the business where it has a physical address.

• In addition to optimizing your core website pages for your city of location, you would likely be building out additional content on the website to showcase the additional cities to which you will travel to serve. So, if you serve in 10 cities within Ohio, then that would be 10 pages of unique, terrific content, optimized for your services in that specific city. A common way to approach this is to showcase your work in those cities, which should be easy for a magician to do. Just remember, the content must be unique on each page. The point of this work is to go after high organic rankings for cities in which you lack a physical location. You're unlikely to achieve local pack rankings for any city in which you're not physically located, but you can pursue organic rankings via a combination of content development, social buzz and link earning.

• Google will personalize users' results based on their physical location whether or not they add a geo-modifier. If I search for 'pizza', Google shows me a local pack of pizza places in my city. But, this behavior is typically on a city basis - not a state basis, so that's an important distinction. On mobile devices, this type of city-based geo-personalization is even more pronounced, to the point that you'll get different results when you're at one end of town than you will at the other end of town for many queries.

So, basically, I think Local SEO is the area you need to be investigating and learning about. All Moz Members have free access to our new Moz Local Learning Center (http://moz.com/learn/local) and we have lots of great Local SEO blog posts on the Moz blog.

I hope this helps with your question.