What the best way is to find keywords for my local website

[michaelmouse]

I'm wondering if there are any high keywords I might be missing out on and so I'm wondering what the best way to find keywords for my local niche and also if there's a way to find out who is currently performing best for those local keywords?

Thanks

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Dougie!

So far, you've received a lot of great suggestions for tools. I'm going to make one additional really down-to-Earth suggestion about this topic. Survey your staff (any member of your team who communicates directly with your customers) to find out exactly what words they hear/see your customers using when asking about your products and services.

This is an important task for 2 reasons:

1. Corporate lingo and consumer lingo are not always the same. You may call that thing a Craftmatic Adjustable Lazyboy Model 23-T4D. I may call it a recliner. Be sure you're using the customers' language, including synonyms, in your optimization, writing and marketing.

2. Regional language difference matter. If you sell pop but I drink soda or cola, we're missing each other.

Pull your staff findings into a keyword focus spreadsheet to expand the way you write and speak about your products. Hope this helps!

[MattRoney]

Personally, I'd suggest giving Moz's own Keyword Explorer a try.

[Chris_Hickman]

Finding keywords is a really popular problem, as they mentioned before there are a lot of tools dedicated to this. The most popular tool is Google AdWords keyword planner. This will provide related keywords based on a list you provide and can be ranked by popularity.

A new tool I've found to be very useful is http://answerthepublic.com/ which provides results based on the most popular questions people are asking related to your industry. This can be great for blog post ideas or content for your pages.

Also, a recent article answered this same question with a great list of resources: 
https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/24/what-people-search-for-most-popular-trends-keywords-topics/

As for the second part of your question, the only free way to see who is performing best for specific keywords is to type them into search and look at the ads yourself. Be sure not to click on the competitor ads, as you probably already know it's against the terms of service.

[NortonSupportSEO]

try google search console keywords - copy the keywords from search console and feed it into google adwords - keyword planner to get more ideas.

[Pureout]

There are a number of Keyword tools you can use for this such as Google Keyword Planner, Uber Suggest, Google Trends, etc...  I also use SeoStack Keyword Tool which is a free Google App to generate lists of keywords for particular topics or verticals. Hope it helps!