Keyword research for a local business

Keyword research for a local business means finding the exact words people in your area type when they need what you sell, then deciding which page of your website answers each of those searches. For a local firm, it's less about huge search volumes and more about intent: a few dozen people searching "emergency vet open Sunday" in your city are worth more than thousands looking up "dog health tips".

You can do it in an afternoon with free tools. The result should be a short keyword map, one line per page, not a spreadsheet with 2,000 rows you'll never use.

Step 1. Start with your own customers

Before any tool, collect the words customers already use. Look through recent emails, contact form messages, call notes, reviews and text messages. Write down how people describe their problem, not how your industry describes the service. A homeowner writes "my AC is blowing warm air", not "refrigerant recharge". A patient asks about "a filling that fell out", not "restorative dentistry".

Then ask yourself and your staff: what are the five questions people ask most often on the phone? Those questions are future headings, FAQ answers and sometimes whole pages.

Step 2. List your services the way you sell them

Write every service that makes you money, one per line. Mark the ones with the best margin and the ones you want more of. Keyword research should support your business priorities. There's little point ranking for a service you dislike doing or barely profit from.

Step 3. Expand with free Google tools

• Autocomplete. Type the service into Google and note the suggestions. Add letters ("drain cleaning a", "drain cleaning b") to see more.
• People also ask. The questions in this box are real searches. They're ideal for FAQs and short blog posts.
• Related searches at the bottom of the results page.
• Google Ads Keyword Planner. Free with a Google Ads account. Set the location to your metro or state to get regional estimates.
• Search Console. If your site is a few months old, the Performance report shows the exact searches you already appear for. Phrases with many impressions but few clicks are quick wins.

Step 4. Add location and intent modifiers

Local searches come in a few shapes:

Check which towns, suburbs and neighborhoods your customers actually come from. In a metro area, people often search by suburb rather than the big city name.

Step 5. Look at what Google already shows

Search each important phrase and look at the results page. If you see a map pack with local businesses, the phrase has local intent and your Google Business Profile matters as much as your website. If you see only national articles, it's an informational search better suited to a blog post. If you see directories like Yelp or Angi on top, you'll want to be listed there as well as ranking yourself.

Step 6. Group phrases by intent and assign them to pages

Now group your list. Phrases that would be answered by the same page belong together. Each group gets one page:

• Home page: your main category plus your city.
• One service page per main service, each targeting its service phrases and close variants.
• Location pages only where you genuinely serve that area and can say something specific about it; read about city landing pages without doorway pages before creating them.
• Blog posts for questions and cost research.

Write the map as a simple table: page, main phrase, three to five related phrases, status (exists, needs rewrite, missing).

Step 7. Check your pages against the map

For each page, make sure the main phrase appears in the page title, the main heading, the first paragraph and naturally a few more times in the text. Use related phrases in subheadings. If a page doesn't exist yet, that's your content plan. My article on blog posts that bring customers shows how to turn question-type keywords into articles that lead to inquiries.

An example keyword map

Here is what part of a finished map might look like for a small electrical contractor in the suburbs of a large city:

Five lines, and the next three months of content are already planned. That is the whole point of the exercise. Keep the map in a shared document, update the status column as pages go live, and add a column for the date each page was last reviewed, so nothing quietly goes stale for two years.

Common mistakes

• Chasing big national keywords a local business will never rank for.
• Writing one page for every tiny variation ("plumber Dallas", "Dallas plumber", "plumbers in Dallas"). Google understands they're the same search.
• Ignoring Spanish or other languages your customers use. If a large share of your customers search in another language, translated pages written by a fluent speaker can be worth it. I write in English, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian; Spanish copy would come from your own team or translator.
• Forgetting to recheck. Run through Search Console every quarter; new phrases appear as you grow.

Keyword research is the first step of any SEO plan. If you'd rather have it done along with the pages it leads to, my SEO content writing service covers both, and local SEO starts from $750/month.