Local SEO Keyword Research: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide

Local keyword research is the process of identifying keywords that people use to find local products and services. Ranking for these keywords drives targeted local traffic to your website and leads to more sales.

What is the significance of local keyword research?

Local keyword research is essential because you must understand what people type into search engines such as Google when looking for your company's products or services.

That may seem obvious, but that is part of the problem.

Most people simply guess these keywords and assume they understand how people search for their business. This frequently leads to them targeting the wrong keywords or completely ignoring keywords that could benefit their bottom line.

How to Conduct a Local Keyword Search

Simply follow these five easy steps.

Describe the services you provide.
Examine for local intent.
Examine search volume
Keywords should be grouped and mapped.
Look for items to mention in Step

Describe the services you provide.

Before you even begin looking for keywords, you should first understand the services provided by the company. This is something you should do whether you're doing local keyword research for a client or for your own business.

Examine for local intent

Local SEO is concerned with ranking for keywords with local intent, which means that the people searching for them are specifically looking for local services.

The next step is to ensure that those looking for these services actually want to shop locally.

If you live in the same town as the business you're researching local keywords for, the simplest way to get started is to search Google for your services. Google will personalise the results based on your location, so you can tell if there is local intent by looking at the SERP for two things:

A map pack of local businesses that appear in the organic search results.

Consider the search volume.

Accurate local search volumes for local keywords are difficult to obtain because almost every major SEO tool only displays national and global volumes.

But here's the thing: people overestimate the importance of search volumes in local SEO.

Even if the search volume for your services is extremely low, you should still create a page about it for your visitors.

Consider the boiler installation service.

In a small town, very few people are likely to be looking for this. However, if you provide a service, you should probably still create a page about it because it is useful for visitors, including those who found you by Googling something broad like "plumber."

Keywords should be grouped and mapped to URLs.

Local keyword research is more than just discovering what people are looking for. It's also important to know how you'll target those keywords.

Most of the time, your homepage will not rank for all of the services you provide.

That is why most local businesses dedicate pages to each service.

This is where things can get a little complicated because it's not always clear which services require dedicated pages and which don't.

Look for things to say.

Assume that one of your services is boiler repair.

How does one go about creating a page that ranks locally for boiler repair and related terms?

Unfortunately, keyword stuffing is the approach that many people take here. This is where they find the entire most common ways people search for a service and use those exact phrases in their copy.

Look for frequently asked questions.

People looking for your services are likely to have a few questions before hiring you. So it's worthwhile to look for these questions and respond to them on your page.

There are several approaches to this.

The first method is to look for a "People also ask" box in the search results after searching for your service. This page displays various related questions that Google users have asked.

How to monitor local keyword positions

After you've completed your local keyword research and created your pages, you'll need a way to track your local keyword rankings. Here's how you can do it with Ahrefs Rank Tracker: