Local Search Marketing - Finding The Critical Keywords

If you own a local small or medium-sized business and are serious about being found through local search marketing, optimizing your site for the right keywords is absolutely critical.

Keywords are the descriptive phrases that online searchers use to find something. Sometimes the uninitiated will think they need to think these keywords up themselves. “What would I type in to find my business?”. Big mistake.

While it is fine to use your own ideas are a starting point, this should never displace solid keyword research based on hard historical data.

If you have never done keyword research before, you’d be amazed at how quickly you can put a keyword list of hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords together, most of which you would never have thought of yourself. But all of these keywords are not created equally. You will need to identify the keywords which are used steadily (unless your business is seasonal) and reasonably often AND that have relatively low levels of competition.

In the first case, there is little point in choosing keywords that are only going to be used infrequently. This is fairly obvious. You want to choose keywords that consistently get good levels of traffic. And in the second case, remember your end game here…your objective is to get your site showing up on the first page results of the search engines. Therefore, your second cut at choosing your keywords is to select those that have moderate levels of traffic and which you have a reasonable chance of ranking well for over a near to moderately near timeframe.

In addition to that, you also want to select keywords that have high commercial intent. In other words, you want to find those keywords that indicate the searcher is likely looking to buy rather than just browsing.

In the offline world, think of how a salesperson reads your buying readiness. If you come into an electronics store and say you are interested in TVs, you are not going to be as close to making a buying decision as if you come in asking about the Samsung LN52B750 1080p LCD HDTV. You get the point…if you know the details of what you’re looking for, you’ve already done the research and are pretty much ready to buy.

A heads-up here…you’ll have a big head start if you have prior data that is specific to your site. This might be in the form of a paid advertising campaign you’ve had running on Google for instance, or through analytics data that shows how visitors have been finding your site to date.

But not to worry if you don’t…available broad historical data and good judgment will satisfactorily guide you in choosing the best keywords to use.

And finally, for local businesses, you want to add greater relevance by modifying your keywords by local modifiers. These modifiers will make it easier to rank well for your geo-modified keywords (less competition) and will at the same time attract the visitors who could actually be your future customers because they are in your area already.

For businesses that may have both a bricks-and-mortar AND online operation, you may choose a different set of keywords for each, with the most notable difference being the inclusion or exclusion of geo-modifiers.

Keyword selection is really the foundation for all other local search marketing activity. Dismiss it at your own peril. If you’re serious about starting on the right foot, get in touch with us today…we’re here to help you!