In this post, I want to address something that many of you have asked me over the past few months; it’s all to do with keyword research.
Some of you might be familiar with the fact that I have a video on YouTube which is all about how to do keyword research – you can find it on my channel. It’s had nearly 20,000 views and, obviously, lots of people have benefited from it.
More importantly, they’ve asked me some more questions about keyword research, in the comments section on YouTube.
One thing that keeps coming up is with regard to local businesses – how to do keyword research for local businesses. One of the questions on that original video is, “Does this method work for local business too?”
Well, the answer is, that original video was aimed at people who have an international or online business – not a local business. So that’s what I’m going to address here… I’ll actually show you how to use the Google keyword tool, if you have a local business.
How to Do Keyword Research for Local Business
This will apply to you whether you’re using Google for paid search advertising or whether you’re using it for ranking in Google (just using the organic search engines).
You’ll notice – if you watch the video above – that I’ve already filled out an ‘occupation’ and an ‘area’ (I’ll talk about that in a second) but the very first thing you need to do is go over to the Google Keyword Tool.
Now, if you search Google to find the Keyword Tool, you’ll notice that the very top result is Google.com and underneath that is Google.co.uk. You would think that the Google.co.uk result is the one that you want to go for, but, once you sign in – at least in my experience – you actually get re-directed to Google.com anyway. So, it doesn’t really matter whether you choose Google.co.uk or Google.com.
You also need to make sure that you sign in to the Keyword Tool because if you don’t sign in, then you do get different results. They’re generally not quite as accurate and also there’s not as many search results. So, if you don’t sign in, you only get access to 100 search results, 100 different keywords that Google finds; whereas, if you do sign in, then you get 700 more – so a total of 800 keywords to make use of.
That’s not to say that you’ll always find 800 keywords for your particular business. In fact, if you’re doing it for local business, you may find that it is only a few 100 – but that’s okay. We’re not really looking for volume here. We’re looking for the stuff that works and, of course, that’s what I’m here to show you.
Selecting Your Starting Phrase and Filters
The first thing to europe cell phone number list do is, go and type in – where it says ‘word or phrase’ – the thing that you do, plus the area that you do it in. So, in this case, I’ve put ‘accountant London’ or ‘accountant in London.’
Now, obviously, I’m not an accountant, but I’ve just used this for demonstration purposes.
Then go down to where it says ‘Advanced Options and Filters.’
When you do that, you need to choose ‘Locations and Languages’ and select your country; you can put it to English as well if you want to, but it will, by default, go to English if you’re on the English version of Google.
Further down here choose ‘Desktop and Laptop’ devices and then from the Filter Ideas, you need to select ‘Local Monthly Searches’ of more than 500. Then ‘Add Another’ and then go to ‘Local Monthly Searches’ of less than 1500.
Now, that’s the top end of how much traffic you want that particular keyword to get. Obviously, I want to get you as much traffic as possible to your site, but we do have to cut it off at a certain point.
