How does keyword research need to change when you are working with a local small business service provider? (Roofer, plumber, inspector, painter etc)
“If the whole point of a content gap analysis is to learn from your competitors and see how you can do it better, why would you want to compare your client’s site to a competitor who isn’t doing its best to meet their potential customers’ search intent?” “While it’s very important to see what’s in the SERP to know what’s missing from your client’s content, it’s also important to step back and think about the query as a user.
Celeste Gonzalez (Excerpt from her post on using keyword gap Analysis for local businesses.
Maybe there is something missing in the SERP that a user would really benefit from. It can even help to think about it from a consumer perspective, asking yourself: what information would I need to make a purchase/submit a form/place a call?
It can be as simple as expressing your client’s story, their expertise, or their knowledge of the areas they serve. Use your client’s uniqueness as a factor to stand out and really show users that they are the right choice—whether that’s simply for information about their industry or as a service provider.”
I have to trust my gut a lot more so than with more voluminous terms. If it is a smaller market I may not see any search volume in tools like Ahrefs. However just because {Small town location} + plumber doesn’t show, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.Sometimes I replace {smalltown} with larger metros like NYC to see if I can find a trend I was not aware of.
Andy of Loganix
Besides researching the keywords for the specific services, make sure you also include locations, both at a city and neighborhood level. Don’t worry too much about search volume because location based keywords won’t have much, but that doesn’t mean no one is using them. They are extremely relevant, so even low search volume can provide good conversions.
Roberto Robles Upvotes: 3
I would recommend using tools like AlsoAsked where you can find common queries from PAA boxes. It’s also good when doing general keyword research for local service providers to focus on the SERP features that come with certain terms as many local SERPs prioritise features over text listings. This can feed into the schema on your page, having FAQs that answer questions related to your chosen keywords and topics
Luke Alex Davis – Upvotes: 2
When doing keyword research at the local level, it’s important to make sure you add in location modifiers to your target keywords for each of your service areas. For example, a plumber in the Baltimore area might want to rank for “plumber in Baltimore” as well as “plumber in Towson.” Overall, the goal is to understand what keyword phrases are geographically unique to the area you’re looking to rank in.
Noah Kain Upvotes: 1
Use variations of city and query in search to determine which competitors surface in the Local Pack. If you find one or two competitors being shown repeatedly, take a look at their page structures and how they’re targeting those terms. Is the query in the url, title, H1, body? How can you do it as/more effectively?
Taylor Murchison
There are tools that specifically help with local keyword research like Mangools, though volume will be low. I’ve found once you get a site going with the right content on it, you can use GSC to see what types of queries are coming up and optimize towards those as a secondary phase to your strategy.
Ken Choi
Also G Business profile Insights gives you data on what queries your business shows up for right now.
[You] can also run a small google ads campaign and with broad match see what kinds of keywords come up.
Don’t just use your locality when doing keyword research, use other geographic modifiers to see what’s happening in other areas. For example, don’t just research “My_City Service,” do some research around “Big_City1 Service” and “Big_City2 Service.” This is especially important if your geo target is relatively small.
Ross Jones of We Get To Travel
LEARN SEO 1 BIT AT A TIME
Personally I learn a BIT of SEO by hanging out on Twitter, Facebook and Slack groups. That is why I am recapping the answers to common SEO questions or challenges I see on social channels in posts like these so that you can also start learning SEO like I do. Here’s some recent #seobits I’ve tackled:
- Use Regex in Google Search Console to get extra data
- Why you shouldn’t include Thank You pages in your Sitemap
- How to Improve Your /Blog main home page
- Why would you keep 301 redirects in your sitemap?
- Generate a forecast of potential SEO traffic
- 4 problems that ruin small business websites for users
