How To Do Keyword Research For Local Business

March 27, 2019

Over the years many SEO strategists focused heavily on ranking for competitive keywords and phrases relating to their client’s services or product offerings and neglecting the potential of local SEO. While these big companies are spending thousands of dollars running ads, small and medium-sized business have been utilizing Local SEO and repping its benefits. In this article, I want to show 3 ways we perform effective local SEO keyword research using both free and paid SEO tools. Towards the end of this article, we will show you how you can leverage your competition’s valuable traffic by identifying their best-performing keywords. Now before we start you will need to figure out which keyword research tools you will use.

Best Keyword Research Tool

The foundation of your SEO is keyword research, therefore, the tool you use for keyword research is going to be the one thing you want to really get familiar with. The good news is there are many keyword research tools out there and we have tried virtually every single one (paid & free). Below are the top 3 keyword research tools in the SEO community. It doesn’t matter which one you choose, just chose one and stick to it. The reason being is that not one keyword tool will be 100% accurate and switching between two tools will give you poor metric data due to lack of consistency.

♦ The first tool is Ahrefs, it is a really paid keyword research tool and it is not the cheapest, with prices starting from $99 single account $1000 for an agency account. All team members at Admoore make the investment and use this tool because it helps us streamline search engine optimization productivity. This tool has some amazing metrics and makes keyword research seem ever so effortless.

♦ Semrush is a great tool for keyword research; keyword tracking strategy used by competition; running website audits; prospecting for backlink opportunities; and many more features.

♦ MozLocal is a great tool for local SEO keyword research. For off-page SEO Moz helps identify your business listings metrics such as inconsistency of local directories; inconsistency of social listings; checking listings on Bing and Google. You can perform many amazing things with Moz and it is all for half the price of ahrefs.

Keyword ResearchTools

If you don’t want to pay for a keyword research tool there are other free alternatives. Most of these tools will give you virtually every metric you need to perform effective SEO. We have listed below the best free keyword research tools that you can use for your own business or the clients.

If you had just one free keyword research tool to use it would have to be UberSuggest. With ubersuggest you can check domain overview; check top SEO pages; check backlink data; generated keyword suggestions; curate content idea; and much more. Highly recommend this tool.

♦ Keywords Everywhere: This is a chrome extension that is very useful. After you have installed the chrome extension, when you are performing a search you will see related keywords to the bottom of your screen as well on the right of your screen. This is an effective tool when qualifying broad keyword ideas.

♦ Google Keyword Planner: is a free reliable tool offered by Google. And because it is owned by Google, people trust the accuracy of this tool. Keep in mind you will need an Adwords account to access this keyword planner.
♦ KWfinder is a great alternative to paid keyword tools. With KWfiner you get both research and analysis tool, essentially bringing you hundreds of long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

How to do Keyword Research with Ahrefs

There are virtually thousands of keywords that your competition is ranking for and you are not. Sometimes being that our keyword research is mediocre or we’ve yet to even consider a certain keyword. Using this tactic with Ahref has helped us drive MAXIMUM traffic to our client’s website(s). You can compare keywords side by side with your competition one by one or multiple at once. In most cases, there is no need to reinvent the wheel just do what is clearly already working.

“COMPETING DOMAINS“, you will see a list of competitors domains. Here you will see great metrics such as common keyword percentage and keywords unique to your target website. Some of the best keyword research comes from this very step.

Competitor Keyword Research

You can also filter by multiple domain URL. This essentially will give you highly targeted keywords. The objective behind this is to get the keywords that all 3 domains are ranking for but our targeted website isn’t. This is very useful when performing competitive research

Rank Local Without a Physical Location

You don’t necessarily need a brick and mortar location to rank for location terms. If you have the right local search strategy you can dominate the search engines. To do this you want to list all of your competition and filter by your respective local term. For the purpose of this blog, we will be using the term “new york”. Here you will see all the valuable keywords that your competitors are ranking for with the term “New York”. This is a very lethal way of identifying the keywords that your competition probably spent hours researching.

At the end of the day, Google has one goal in mind and that is to give its users a good users experience, which is exactly what makes this a very effective tactic. This reason is something referred to as users intent. If someone is searching for the term “tree service new york”, there is a good chance that this person lives in New York and is looking for tree service.

Optimizing For Local SEO Search

Implementing the following local strategy mentioned below can get you ranked for local keyword terms over your competition.

♦ Location specific keywords: you need to make sure you have the location of your business in the title tag; homepage; meta description; as well as in the copy of your content. If it important that you include your keyword however be cautious of over-optimizing.

Local Directory Listings: There are hundreds of directories you can sign up to however we recommended you pick a handful that hold weight like Yelp and Yellow Pages, as well as other local directories. You can find the top local directories below.

Google My Business: GMB is a service platform for business owners, owned and operated by Google. This service helps local business leverage their local consumer by building reviews similar to that of Yelp. With this platform you can also make posts; post pictures; check customer insights; create an Ad; reply to clients reviews and many more feature. You must claim and optimize your Goole my business if you want local clients to find your product/service.

Having a mobile-friendly website: Having your website optimized for mobile will give your users a good user experience but it will also help you avoid getting penalized by Google. Find out more information and how to optimize your website for mobile here.

Importance Of Local Keyword Research

The benefits of ranking for any local search terms really depends on your business. For many businesses such as Amazon or other companies with global reach might not benefit very much from local search terms. However, for the majority of small business, there is much success. Many business owners are starting to realize the importance of local search and are making the investment in hiring digital marketing agency like us at Admoore. Other prefer to do it themselves which is absolutely okay because they contact us and we are there to teach and walk them through the process. We help them create a local SEO strategy that will be their main source of marketing.