Trying to target a small, specific region with your keywords can prove frustrating. While reaching a high-intent local audience is incredibly valuable, without volume data to inform your keyword research, you'll find yourself hitting a wall. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares how to uncover powerful, laser-focused keywords that will reach exactly the right people.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about hyperlocal keyword research. Now, this is a big challenge, not only for hyperlocal-focused businesses, but also for all kinds of websites that are trying to target very small regions, and many of them, with their keyword research and keyword targeting, on-page optimization.
The problem:
So the problem tends to be that most keyword research tools, and this includes things like the Google AdWords Tool, it includes Moz's Keyword Explorer, or KeywordTool.io, or Übersuggest, or anybody you want to use, most of them are relying on volume data.
So what happens is when you see a bunch of keyword suggestions, you type in "Sequim," for example, Sequim is a tiny town on Washington's peninsula, so across the Puget Sound from where we are here in Seattle. Sequim has a population of like 6,500 people or something like that, so very tiny. So most searches related to Sequim have no volume data in any of these tools. As a result, you don't see a lot of information about: How can I target these keywords? What are the right ones to go after? You don't know whether a keyword has zero searches a month, or whether it has four searches a month, and those four searchers are exactly who you want to get in front of, and this is really problematic.
There are three solutions that we've seen professional SEOs use and that some of us here at Moz use and the Moz Local team uses, and these can be real handy for you.
Solution 1: Use keyword data for larger, similar regions
So the first one is to basically replicate the data by using keyword information that comes from similar regions nearby. So let's say, okay, here we are in Sequim, Washington, population 6,669. But Port Angeles is only a few miles away. I think maybe a couple dozen miles away. But its population is more like 20,000. So we've got four or five times the keyword volume for most searches probably. This is going to include some outlying areas. So now we can start to get data. Not everything is going to be zero searches per month, and we can probably backtrack that to figure out what Sequim's data is going to be like.
The same thing goes for Ruidoso versus Santa Fe. Ruidoso, almost 8,000. But Santa Fe's population is almost 10 times larger at 70,000. Or Stowe, Vermont, 4,300, tiny, little town. Burlington is nearby, 10 times bigger at 42,000. Great. So now I can take these numbers and I can intuit what the relative volumes are, because the people of Burlington are probably similar in their search patterns to the people of Stowe. There are going to be a few differences, but for most types of local searches this will work.
Solution 2: Let Google autosuggest help
The second one, Google autosuggest can be really helpful here. So Google Suggest does not care if there's one search a month or one search in the last year, versus zero searched in the last year. They'll still show you something. Well, zero searched in the last year, they won't show you anything.
But for example, when I search for "Sequim day," I can intuit here, because of the ordering that Google Suggest shows me, that "Sequim day spa" is more popular than "day care." Sequim, by the way, sounds like a lovely place to live if you are someone who enjoys few children and lots of spa time, apparently. Then, "day hikes."
So this technique doesn't just work with Google itself. It'll also work with Bing, with Google Maps, and with YouTube. Another suggestion on this one, you will see different results if you use a mobile device versus a desktop device. So you might want to change it up and try your mobile device. That can give you some different results.
Solution 3: Use lexical or related SERP suggestions
All right. Third tactic here, last one, you can use sort of two styles of keyword research. One is called lexical, which is basically the semantic relationships between words and phrases. The other one is related SERP suggestions, which is where a keyword research tool — Moz Keyword Explorer does this, SEMrush is very popular for this, and there are a few others — and they will basically show you search terms the links that came up, the search results that came up for "Sequim day care" also came up in searches for these terms and phrases. So these are like SERPs for which your SERP also ranked.
You can see, when I searched for "Sequim day care," I did this in Keyword Explorer, because I happen to have a Moz Keyword Explorer subscription. It's very nice of Moz to give me that. You can see that I used two kinds of suggestions. One are related to keywords with similar results, so that's the related SERPs. The other one was based on closely related topics, like the semantic, lexical thing. "Sequim day care" has given me great stuff like "Banbury School Nursery," a nearby town, "secondary schools in Banbury," "Horton Day Nursery," which is a nursery that's actually near there, "Port Angeles childcare," "children's nursery."
So now I'm getting a bunch of keyword suggestions that can potentially be relevant and lead me down a path. When I look at closely related topics, I can see things like closely related topics. By the way, what I did is I actually removed the term "Sequim," because that was showing me a lot of things that are particular to that region. But if I search for "day care," I can see lots of closely related topics, like day care center, childcare, school care, special needs children, preschool programs, and afterschool programs. So now I can take all of these and apply the name of the town and get these hyperlocal results.
This is frustrating still. You don't have nearly the data that you have for much more popular search terms. But this is a good way to start building that keyword list, targeting, experimenting, and testing out the on-page work that you're going to need to do to rank for these terms. Then, you'll start to see your traffic grow from these.
Hyperlocal may be small, but it can be powerful, it can be very targeted, and it can bring you exactly the customers you're looking for.
So good luck with your targeting out there, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for the great WBF.
We opt for the simplest method of "keyword+locality" or "locality+keyword". It has always worked because that is how most people search, with the common search terms accompanied by a geo-specific prefix or suffix.
We avoid the angst of worrying about minor regional keyword differences because now, with semantic search, Google will figure it out in any case. The key to this is to not over complicate it.
Further to this, you can combine clusters of localities on the same page, as Google already knows exactly where you mean. You generally cluster around a regional center, so in your example Port Angeles along with Sequim, Agnew, Coville, Joyce, etc.
Also, frequently small town inhabitants will not even expect to find a result so they will put in the closest regional center instead.
We've been doing this for years and it works quite well, as we have about 50 branches scattered around the country in regional centers.
If you really want to nail it specifically, you can always run an AdWords campaign for a couple of weeks to see exactly what is happening and then do some fine tuning.
Hey Eric
I also agree with the Adwords part very strongly. :)
Afraz
If you do a Google keywords Volume Test on "keyword+locality" or "locality+keyword" it should add benefit with very little overhead. You might be supprised at some small shifts in your simple strategy that pays huge dividend. These small shifts can be uncovered by the volume check.
Unfortunately I've noticed the keyword planner usually gives the same keywords, forward and backward. I use AdWords to figure it out for me.
Great WBF explaining how to research keywords for local SEO. I will give you another example. suppose we are doing research for a tour company and the keyword is London Tours now if we search with the default settings (All Countries) we will get some volume for this words but for some languages the keyword research will show 0 or negligible volume. e.g. for google.de the equivalent word in German is London Touren But since the German market is very small in search volume compared to the English speaking audience all over the world, the search volume will be very small and at times show zero.
But since we know that there are lots of people searching for the key word else where, there must be some people searching for it in Germany even though the volume may be small.
This same concept can be extended to the Spanish speaking market in the US, which are much lower in number compared to the English speaking audience.
Hey Rand happy to see your long Moustache back.
Hyperlocal keywords are focused to limited area people, although can bring hug benefits by providing prominent coverage area. But marketers rarely give focus to hyperlocal keywords and the reason behind is unawareness or lacks of ways to find. You have shared the so long missed topic. Thanks for sharing, I am optimizing these ways.
I've got a small law firm and do my own SEO. One of the things I've found here in Portland Oregon is that people search for not only variations of the actual city name (e.g. portland, portland or, portland oregon, etc), but they also search via other regional identifiers. They sometimes search by quadrants (e.g. attorney se portland, lawyer nw portland, etc) and other times they let Google decide (divorce attorney near me, dui lawyer near me, etc). They sometimes search by zip code (lawyer 97204, attorney 97202, etc). Surprisingly, they sometimes use the airport code (dui attorney pdx, divorce lawyer pdx), which I find amusing. They sometimes also search by county-- because many cases are heard not at the municipal level, but county level (e.g. multnomah county divorce lawyer, or clackamas county dui attorney, etc).
Lastly, we often think of cities as much bigger than they really are. Seattle actually isn't that big in terms of geography, and neither is Portland. The Seattle metro area can include Seattle, Mercer Island, Redmond, Issaquah, Newcastle, Bellevue, Kirkland, and even Tacoma. The Portland metro area can include Portland, Beaverton, Gresham, Tigard, Tualatin, King City, Multnomah Village, West Linn, Oregon City, Lake Oswego, Wilsonville, and even Hillsboro. I've found that the more focused you can be, the better.
What's really interesting is when you target an area for services, but your customers are in a different area altogether. I have established physical offices in both Portland and Bend Oregon, and Google knows this. I've received a lot of clients who live in Portland but received a DUI while vacationing on conferencing in Bend, and I'm convinced that the fact that my site targets both those areas helped me in the SERPs. I don't think Google appreciates it when lawyers (or other businesses) pretend to be in a geographic area that they are not.
Interestingly enough, at a Google Connect seminar, one of the Google Local reps told a great story about how local search is starting to really get serious. She was in a biking accident in downtown New York. It wasn't enough for her to find a personal injury attorney in Manhattan, or even uptown, downtown, east side, or west side. She was looking ideally for an attorney in her own neighborhood. As-in, within blocks of her apartment. Now that's local search.
Rand, one question I have for you: I loathe cramming a single page with a ton of mentions of cities, municipalities, suburbs, or even zip codes. It looks spammy. On the other hand, I'm hearing that Google Local doesn't want you to have a ton of pages targeting other cities or regions if your physical business location is someplace else. That also looks spammy. What are your thoughts?
Hi Rand, first—LOVE your shirt. Much fashion, so style, more fab.
Second, thanks for putting together such a great Whiteboard Friday session. Working with a lot of home service company, hyper-local search is extremely important. We don't want to attract someone from California who is looking for AC repair if the business is located in Georgia. Thanks for the great tips and reminders on how to ensure we are correctly targeting the website for the local service area.
Hi, Rand! I never thought in 2 of these ideas you introduced to es! Let me afford you another one.
There are many local news sites and forums where people participate. We can explore what keywords they are using there, what topics are the most visited and the issues with more arguments.
We've scratched new keywords like this and also some insights about what kind of content or stance they are expecting.
Hi Rand, thanks for this friday post as always.
Don't you think it would be better to prioritize a long tail strategy over a hyperlocal keywords? I mean, the results will already be available and you can have a better idea on how to optimize them.
Of course targeting keywords according to your needs and their search volume is far more important as you will be able to capitalize on a well-defined strategy, hozever, I do believe a long tail strategy would give you better insights.
Hey Herman
Indeed long tail feels a little more in, as compared to hyper-local these days. But i think hyper-local will eventually rise to a good extent. Let your content and title change the search trends and suggestions.
Afraz
Can anyone tell , which keyword i have to target less traffic one or more traffic keyword and what is the use of using global keyword ..If we use that it takes time to reach traffic??
One Of the finest post in MOZ blog.
All people want to increase traffic on their website by targeting some focus keyword. As your site want to reach to users make specific keyword with the location, which will give much benefit and get your ranking up.
As per SEO, Keyword density should be maintained from 1.5% to 3% or more.
Thanks, Rand Fishkin.
Great pointers, Rand - I've found related SERP suggestions particularly useful.
It can be a frustrating process as a lot of SEOs have the mindset to focus on large volume keywords, but as you've shown, there are ways to build this up and find opportunities.
My aim with local research in particular is to try and focus on the user's intent and the context surrounding their searches.
There's another big issue when looking for local search if the name of the town/city is the same of the region. I am writting from Alicante, Spain, which is both a city with more than 300.000 population and a region with almost 2 million. How can I solve this to know exactly what they are looking for? Is it even possible?
Regards.
This is interesting stuff and you used a few words I've never heard before...so great learning experience all around! :P
It almost seems too easy to just use keyword groupings based on searches in bigger cities in close proximity to the super small town.
I feel that competition gets more non-existent the smaller the place...and simply being a little broader with your optimization while still dialing in local identifiers (Schema/JSON/or Whatever Its Called Now) will allow you rank for dang near everything you want to and cover pretty much any search.
The rest you can simply fire up an AdWords campaign on broad modified and see what else people might be searching...or simply wait for your Search Console search queries to populate and see what else your site is triggering for.
Lots of options I guess!
the mustache is back!
hyperlocal keywords have 0-1 data but it's like a long tail search intent were in if this specific query occurs it has a high conversion rate
Yes This is very important for us like keyword related niche selectors. Three options is important but I think we should follow at least one.
Hi Rand! This is such a good post and really helpful for small towns but... what if it was viceversa?
I mean, what if the kw you needed had reaaaaaaaaaally low volume that wouldn't even work for your ads? Imagine I'm working in a company that tries to attract house owners to rent their houses in a small island of 500.000 people. The kw results are super low, and we're also searching in our language that has not many speakers (but is needed to be in that language).
Should I still work with those kw or should i change?
Is there any other solution?
Thank you!
Usually local keywords have a low search volume. This makes professional SEO have to use up to local keyword data at the national level. Local keywords will therefore be of little value
Hi Rand,
Thanks again for the quality content. I've been working with a lot of very niche local businesses lately, so this couldn't have come at a better time. I'm almost certain there's some special Moz mind-reading tool in the works!
I've come to dig really deep into conversion-optimisation techniques off the back of my local work. The small number of available searches to capture makes it all the more important to have a razor-sharp strategy for pulling them into your conversion funnel. The unique opportunity that hyperlocal targeting provides is the ability to create content that appeals to a very small demographic successfully. We're not trying to pick up absolutely anyone interested in the subject of, say, 'bespoke kitchens', as great as that would be to rank for on a national scale. We're targeting people within our location, who can be appealed to on a community-level. We can provide unique benefits; in-person meetings, support that can't be matched by a remote operation, etc.
You're completely right that it's a potent platform for success, but you really need to maximise every single avenue to create that successful conversion, whatever that might be. Don't be disheartened guys!
All the best
@Rand. So it means if I search for "transportation in London" so it will be a local search and it gets a good amount of volume. Alternatively, If I do search for "transportation in liverpool" so it will be a hyper-local search and I can get potential but less amount of search volume as "transportation in birkenhead" will show me a relative different result in the SERP. Am I right? Please do elaborate. Thanks.
Don't forget that; Big cities has different zones or neighborhoods really big! Here in Spain, only one neighborhood in Madrid or Barcelona is bigger than the most of the other cities ;)
How big or small would you consider a local search, or an hyperlocal search? Consider also that Madrid is a city (3.1 million population) and a region with 6.5 million. How can you know exactly if I am searching any service in the city or among the region? The same with many cities and regions in Spain and many other countries.
Being from the UK, I would still class Liverpool as local, not hyperlocal. It's the biggest metropolitan city within the Merseyside county. You have to consider the size of the UK versus the US and the populations in small towns in the UK vs the US.
"Transportation in Birkenhead" is still for me local, and something quite competitive to target. You're competing with government websites and Wikipedia at this level.
Hyperlocal for me within the UK would be targeting something as small as villages within the UK like for example "Transportation in St Dennis", where the competition is far less, the results are less, but are still worth the targeting and will yield better results than "Transportation in Liverpool".
Hello Champ,
Always pleasure to watch you on WBF. I guess, it's a good topic to chat about and everybody had this in mind somewhere. When I face something similar to this, I go with "Searches related to" option (At the end of search results in Google).
The one tip I liked here is to go with similar keywords, google is enough smart to understand that. I believe, if you have a strong landing page, relevant contents and attractive title+h1, then your page will rank automatically for maximum search queries. And yes, don't forget to get strong links on that page.
Have a great weekend all !
Firstly, yay the mustache is coming back nicely! :)
As always, extremely insightful, targeted and fun approach to thinking outside the box.
Thanks a lot,
Lewis
Hello, in order to optimize the visibility of a site which is not ranking on what I call topical keywords (for exemple design desk, wood chair etc..) yet, do you think it's a good idea to focus on very specific local keywords too ?
thank you
Be
Good WBF thanks :)
Find and use local keywords can be a realy good strategy for long tail. But how to do local content and avoid duplicate content ? For exemple if I have a national website wich referencing some housing local businesses in countries. If you can do only 30 posts to talk about this subject, is it better to split them in multiple countries or not precise countries in post to be present nationally ?
Thanks and sorry for my English :D
I also Combine Target keywords + Geo Location, if we are looking for local leads.
Great video Rand and glad to see all of the videos with your mustache haven't been released yet ;) Thankfully we were using 3 of these tactics already excluding "lexical". Looking forward to diving deeper into it, as well as Moz's tools to see how they can benefit us more.
Hyperlocal is the future. I appreciate the tips.
Thank you for producing quality content like this, i love white hat friday :-)
Hi Rand,
Totally agree with the suggestion, in my point of view the point is "ultra-segmentation", here we have about 500 shops in the street, in 500 different cities, and we have to deal with duplicate content, Google Local, pin in Maps.
Sometimes it's really hard, specially with duplicate content issues, and we have to be very aware with Panda issues, but with good planning and monitoring it's possible to reach the goal ;)
Do you have some extra advice for this kind of accounts/clients/projects?
Thanks a lot Rand!
Hey Sergio
How are you having duplicate content issue??
I mean are you not going all unique?
Afraz
Hi Afraz,
I think every domain have duplicate content, the point are the indexing rules you give to Google ;)
Hey Rand
Right on Spot.....! :)
Well i was actually curious "what could be the discussion points you raise at the end", and there is nothing today. :(
Anyway, i'd still like to add a little as per my experience.
What are your impressions on these by the way?
Best Regards:
Afraz
Hey Rand,
In the future, will tools like Moz KWE will be able to show us search volumes for small areas, such as 4 searches compared to 0 searches in a small town?
Hi Rand,
Great WBF!
It made me think about a large eCommerce client I have. They have their own stores but also sell in stores like Walmart. Would it be smart to mention those hyper-local cities that the Walmart's are in? So lets say they have a New Jersey location page. On that state page, would it be beneficial to mention the Freehold, NJ Walmart because it carries the products?
I am not saying we are doing this, because the pages would be huge,but just curious on your thoughts about that type of hyper-local keyword inclusion.
Apart from all mentioned, I also refer to Local news for latest trends and keywords in case of hyperlocal optimization. This has always worked for me and the clients.
I love local! And the info that the auto suggest tools display in order of popularity is new for me. I guess I knew it, but I never thought about it in terms of keyword research. Thank you.
hi!
I agree with the Adwords part very strongly. :(
Man, you solved my problem. I was seriously hitting on a wall for last 2 months, I picked a few keywords from Google auto suggest but it was wrong pick I guess. thanks for sharing this undiscovered discussion/topic :)
Great WBF Rand!
Just a simple question, what will be the effect of long tail keywords in Local search? adding cities + similar local area.
Thanks Again!
The 2nd and 3rd one is very effective to find out a profitable keyword. I already use these solutions. But, the 1st one is new to me. Hope this also will be very helpful. Many many thanks for such awesome share. You know, that's why I love MOZ.
Hey MOZ Team
Someone has given thumbs down on all of my comments on this post. :(
I wonder these weren't that bad anyway. :)
Regards:
Afraz
i how i make my side like you i cam from germany and start whit my side werkzeug-liste.de. bat the rank not will go ? can one body help me please wot i can do to rank.thx