Remember when needing a plumber, an electrician, or even finding a good restaurant in the local area meant grabbing the Yellow Pages? Maybe I’m showing my age a bit. Things have changed a lot. More than 80% of people now search for a local business online at least once a week, according to one survey.
Remember when needing a plumber, an electrician, or even finding a good restaurant in the local area meant grabbing the Yellow Pages?
Maybe I’m showing my age a bit.
Things have changed a lot. More than 80% of people now search for a local business online at least once a week, according to one survey.
And local searches are some of the most high intent searches on the internet.
If someone searches for a plumber, it’s because they need the service, not because they’re curious about the job.
If someone searches for a Chinese restaurant in a particular area, it’s because they’re looking for somewhere to eat.
So showing up for these local searches is (almost) a guaranteed way to get an enquiry.
This means having a local keyword strategy as part of your SEO.
And this blog will show you how to do it.
This is the easy bit. Write down the service you sell.
Stairlift installer.
Loft conversion.
Landscape gardener.
Whatever it is you do, write it down in the simplest terms.
Remember, Google is looking for relevance and distance to the searcher when looking at local SEO keywords.
We call them “geo-modifiers”, but it basically means adding locations to your service to make them locally relevant.
There are two types of geo-modifiers you can use:
Specific: Add specific towns, counties, postcodes (for example, loft conversion company in St Helens)
Non-specific: Near me or landmark searches (for example, pub near Liverpool Lime Street)
You should look to include both types of searches in your local keyword strategy.
As a rule of thumb, especially for service businesses operating in a wider geographic area, we’d recommend a catchment area around 20-30 miles from where you’re located.
This should give you enough search volume and variants to benefit from local keywords, without making you irrelevant to the search intent.
For example, if you work in Liverpool, your local areas will include Liverpool City Centre, Everton, Windle, Kirkby, Bootle, Toxteth etc
But you could also look further afield in areas like St Helens, Burscough, Southport etc
Each area should be added to your Google Business Profile, but will mostly form the basis of your area landing pages on your local business website.
Once you’ve created your list of potential local keywords, you’ll need to validate them, making sure people are actually searching for them, and seeing what kind of search volume they have.
You can do this for free using Google’s Keyword Planner in your Google Ads account (you can set up a free account without running ads)
Just type your keyword (plumber in St Helens) into the search bar and you’ll get a list of relevant keywords including search volume, difficulty and CPC (how much it would cost per click if you ran ads for the keyword).
When prioritising keywords, look to find a balance between search volume, difficulty and commercial intent.
It can be easy to see a keyword with a search volume of 700 and immediately create a page for it.
But, a more specific page with a lower search volume (say 80 monthly searches for same day tyre fitter in Southport) could be a better option because it’s got much higher buying intent behind it.
Another way to validate or expand your list of local SEO keywords is to use a keyword tool like Wincher or Bright Local.
These work the same as Google Keyword Planner, and can show you the search volume, difficulty and CPC of a certain keyword.
Here’s an example from Wincher.
But it’s not just keywords and volume. SEO platforms are useful because they also show what websites are already ranking for your target keywords.
This is useful because it gives you an idea of what pages you’re competing against, and what you need to create to rank higher for the same terms.
Run these searches for each of your service+location variations, taking note of the search volume, difficulty and commercial intent of the keyword.
Once you’ve got all this information, you can start to prioritise your landing pages.
One mistake we see often with local SEO, is businesses trying to rank for multiple locations with one page.
You’ve probably seen these pages before.
They usually have a line like “offering X services to customers in X, X & X areas”. And this could be fine on a homepage with internal links pointing to individual area pages.
The problem with stuffing multiple locations into a single page is that Google is looking for the location relevance of a page.
So, a well-structured area landing page promoting a service for one area (loft conversion in Bootle) is always going to outperform a website trying to cram multiple locations into a single page.
Location is a key ranking factor in local SEO. So once you’ve got your keywords, start to create individual service+location landing pages for each area.
You should have the main keyword (service+location) in the title tag, H1, alt text on images and scattered naturally throughout the content.
You can see from this example below of a office fit out company we created area landing pages for, that the main keyword (office fit out Liverpool) appears in the URL, H1 and in the first paragraph of the copy.
This is a clear signal to Google in local search that this page is relevant to anyone looking for an office fit out company in Liverpool.
And you can also see that this approach works, because Jennor rank number one for the local enquiry: office fit out Liverpool.
It’s also important to have accurate location and NAP (name, address, phone) on each page, as well as adding this info to your LocalBusiness schema markup as part of your technical SEO.
One thing to note on the content of these pages.
Don’t just copy and paste the content from one page to another with the area name changed. Google can view this as duplicate content, and it can stop your page ranking as highly as it could in SERPs.
Instead, make each page locally relevant to the area while focusing on customer pain points.
Use examples of projects completed in the area relevant to the page. Use client logos from local companies. Use testimonials from customers in that area.
Do as much as possible to make each area page unique and relevant to the audience.
It’s worth noting here as well, that this area information should be added to your Google Business profile for each location. I won’t go into that here because we’ve written a full blog on optimising your Google Business Profile.
As you’re publishing area service pages, it’s going to be important to see how they perform, both in terms of how they rank for the relevant keywords, but also whether they’re bringing in enquiries.
We’d usually break our analysis down on a per-month, and quarterly basis.
Check how your landing pages are performing at the end of each month. This will give enough time for Google to recognise any changes you made and reflect these in SERPs.
Then we’d recommend a more in-depth quarterly review of your landing pages and Google Business Profile to look for trends or specific challenges that are coming up.
There are a few platforms you can use to track your local keywords.
Google Search Console is something we use every day. One, it’s free, and it gives you a lot of information about how your pages are performing, what keywords or enquiries you’re being found for, and it gives you good visibility about your overall site health.
An SEO platform like Wincher can also be good here. It lets you group your local SEO keywords so you can easily check how each local keyword group is performing, which you can see an example of below from our own local keyword strategy.
Your Google Business Profile not only shows you many people have seen your profile, clicked through to your website, or booked an appointment, or made a call. It also shows you what keywords or enquiries triggered your profile to appear.
This is valuable information for your local keyword strategy because it can validate that you’re appearing for the right searches based on your keyword research.
If you’re not appearing for these keywords, it’s likely a sign you need to make some improvements to your keyword targeting.
Keyword research is the most essential part of any SEO strategy, but especially in local SEO when appearing higher in search can have immediate commercial benefits.
If you’re struggling to rank for local keywords or want to make your business more visible in local search, our Local SEO services can help.
We’ve got a team of experts who know how to improve your Google Business Profile, find local SEO keywords and create service area landing pages that not only get found, but convert visitors into customers.
Book a free consultation and let’s sit down and see how we can help.
If you’re interested in more local SEO content, read our Local SEO guide.
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