Local keyword research: Boost local SEO with the right terms

Creating a great online experience for local searchers is rooted in intent matching. You need to know how consumers are searching for the brands, goods, services, features, amenities, and qualities being offered by any local business you’re marketing. 

Today, we’ll expand your local keyword research methodologies so that you are accessing a fuller, richer picture of local consumer intent. This will help you match specific organic search queries with the right content to be seen as a relevant answer in search engine results. 

Use Google Autocomplete and “People Also Ask” for geo-modified intent

Google’s own search box is a fantastic starting point for your local keyword research. Use the following step-by-step process to get the most out of it:

1. Come up with a seed list of keywords tied to your brand name, product and services, and any major features or amenities (like outdoor dining, walk-in appointments, pet-friendly, etc.) that you believe the public might be searching for.

2. Go to Google.com and begin typing these terms in, one letter at a time. As you can see in the above example, I’m trying to research how people are looking for vegan tacos near me. As soon as I get to the “ne” of near, Google begins autocompleting my search phrase with a great list of suggested phrases based on the behavior of other searchers. Just this one search term is bringing up 10 interesting additional keyword phrases I definitely want to know about. 

3. Take screenshots and record the information Google’s autocomplete function has surfaced for you. 

Pro tips for finding local gold (aka keyword ideas) in Google autocomplete:

• Use geographic terms in your autocomplete searches—think location modifiers like city names, neighborhood names, zip codes, and even mileage terms like “within 5 miles.”
• Use comparative terms in your autocomplete searches—this can include phrases like “best,” “cheapest,” “fastest,” and “closest.” 
• Use urgency terms in your autocomplete searches—like “open now,” “24-hours,” and “emergency.”
• Use question words in your autocomplete searches—start your queries with the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, and why + how).
• Be on the lookout for long-tail, conversational queries that represent a combination of highly-specific intents. This could include phrases like “where can I get the cheapest vegan tacos within 1 mile” or “what clothing stores in Chicago have organic plus-size clothing.”
• Be on the lookout for proximity variants, like “nearby,” “near me,” and “near X.” This last version typically states another nearby destination like “gluten-free restaurant near Metropolitan Museum.

Use your autocomplete findings to re-optimize old content for the additional search terms you’ve discovered or to create new content based on what you’ve learned about local consumer demand. Brainstorming your local SEO strategy’s next moves is easier, based on real-world data that helps you systematically uncover related keywords and entirely new keywords.

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Autocomplete searches can even help you make or suggest operational changes for brands you market. For example, you might discover that there’s a high demand for “pet-friendly dining” options in your city. If you’re marketing a restaurant, you might debut a pet-friendly day of the week and publicize your new offering to meet this local intent, and you might choose to feature pricing prominently based on local search results.

Analyze competitor location pages and review data

Look up the Google Business Profile (GBP) of a top competitor by searching for their brand name and location. Then, click on the “Website” link (shown above) to be taken to the landing page they have linked to from their listing.

If a top competitor is a single-location business, then the landing page will typically be their website’s homepage, but when you are competing with chains and franchises, it’s common for GBPs to link to a unique landing page for each branch of the business. 

Once you have the URL of the GBP landing page, we recommend starting by reviewing it manually and documenting the following:

• The page’s title tag (pay particular attention to the keywords that have been used)
• All header tags on the page (again, note down keyword phrases being used)
• The use of keywords in main body content, including in main text content, image descriptions, video transcripts, reviews, and any other on-page element

If you’re looking at the single page for a single competitor, manual research is manageable, but in most cases, you’ll want to scale this work across multiple competitors. This is where keyword and competitive research tools will enable you to conduct your investigation efficiently, adding insights into metrics like keyword difficulty and local search volume. . 

Brands like Semrush, Ahrefs, Sistrix, and Moz each have their own competitive analysis suites, and many offer free trials so your agency or business can find the best fit for your use case. 

For example, by using Semrush’s On-page SEO Checker (shown above), you’ll not only receive analysis of your top competitors’ optimization tactics, but also, suggestions for how to improve your own landing page and find the right keywords to capture local organic traffic.

With the Keyword Gap tool (shown above), you can analyze the optimization of up to five competitors at once and discover keywords that they are using but that you are missing. 

We also recommend clicking into the full review section of any competitor’s Google Business Profile and looking at the Place Topics section (shown above). This summary of the words competitors are mentioning most often in their reviews can surface useful business intelligence. For example, it’s easy to see from this overview that reviewer love to write about taco trucks, with 43 mentions.

Click through on that tab and Google will show you all the reviews containing this term. Check out what reviewers are saying. Do they love these tacos or are they saying they need improvement? If you’re marketing a Mexican restaurant, you might realize that the addition of a new menu item paired with re-optimization of the GBP landing page for its search term could be a win, because you’ve discovered it’s what your competitor’s customers are most passionate about in their reviews.

Use Google Business Profile insights to spot high-converting terms

Sherry Bonelli has written an excellent tutorial on all the different information available in Google Business Profile Insights and today we’ll look specifically at the “Searches Breakdown” portion.

Look up “my business” on Google to be taken to the New Merchant Experience dashboard in the SERPs for the business you’re marketing. Click on the “Performance” tab to access your GBP Insights data:

Look at the Searches Breakdown section of this interface. These are the top keyword phrases that triggered your Google Business Profile to be shown in Google’s local results:

Cross-reference these terms with the keywords you’ve used in the optimization of your GBP landing page. Are you missing any terms on the page? Incorporate them. For example, this wedding venue might have already optimized their landing page for a phrase like “wedding venues Chicago” if that’s where their premises are located, but they may have overlooked a broader term, like “wedding venues in Illinois.” By adding this discovered term into their keyword strategy, they could strengthen their online presence to become a better match for a particular intent. 

Layer local modifiers respectfully (not just city names)

We’ve already covered thinking beyond city names in your optimization so that you’re making the most of varied geographic modifiers like neighborhoods, landmarks, zip codes, mileage requirements, and local catch phrases like “near me” and “nearby.” Beyond these basics, you can prove additional local awareness by layering regional language differences into your GBP landing page optimization.

When a business is being operated by a longtime local, it will come naturally to the owner to speak and write in language used by the local community. They already know that their neighbors call a particular sandwich a “sub” instead of a “hero,” take the “metro” instead of the “subway,” and drink “soda,” not “pop.” This scenario becomes less intuitive when:

• The business owner is a newcomer to the community
• The business marketer does not live in the community being served
• The brand is an enterprise with locations that span large geographic regions
• The brand is being marketed to speakers of multiple languages, each with their own vocabulary, abbreviations, and slang

In all of these instances, it’s vital to learn to speak like a local when optimizing landing pages for the use of varying consumer groups. Wikipedia has a starter article on American English Regional Vocabulary and NPR has collated some other fascinating regional variants, but your best asset here is likely the lived experience of any established local staff at each branch. By pooling their knowledge, your branch landing pages can be respectfully optimized to reflect cultural richness, signalling that the business is ready to serve a particular audience.

Explore forums, Reddit, and local Facebook groups for natural language

Another amazing way to discover how a particular community talks informally is to tune into social media discussions on local forums, local Facebook groups, and platforms like Reddit and Quora. Especially useful is looking at threads in which local people are complaining, like the above example, in which the poster is having trouble finding anything to do in a small city. Invariably, other locals rush in to champion their community, like this:

When we look at just this small selection, we may wonder what is meant by “tabletop gaming at OP.” What is this shorthand for? Clearly, at least 10 local people know because they’ve upvoted it. It’s a starting point for further exploration of goods, services, events, landmarks, slang, and other regional nuances that could enhance your ability to optimize like a local. 

We’re also massive fans of anything to do with local nostalgia, which you could consider one of the most powerful forces in life. The above Reddit thread on gambling for food at Taco Bell got 15k upvotes, and journalists have cataloged the fast food chain’s discontinued sauces that the public still craves. If we’re marketing a taco shop, we could explore both topics further to see if a business we’re marketing could reproduce what people are missing. Dive deeper into this phenomenon with Nostalgia: your untapped local marketing opportunity.

Use “near me” variations—but ground them in hyperlocal content

In a series of experiments in 2023, Sterling Sky tested the impacts of optimizing website content for terms like “near me” and “nearby” and published the following outcomes:

• Optimizing pages for this type of language can result in a rankings boost, but tends to be an organic rankings boost, rather than a local pack one. 
• The majority of “near me”-type searches occur on desktop, rather than mobile, devices.

The chance to improve your organic rankings can make it tempting to simply fill pages on your site with “near”-type terms. You should definitely use them, but be wary of making your site’s content read in an unnatural, robotic manner. You don’t want to put potential customers off with spammy-sounding content or get on the wrong side of Google’s sitewide authority signal. Here are two tips for working these terms into your content without over-optimizing:

1. It’s going to read strangely if you’re publishing content that says something like, “Our taco shop provides the best vegan tacos near me.” Instead, take a Q&A approach, modeling content like a conversation that reads, “If you’re wondering ‘where can I get the best vegan tacos near me?’ use our map to find your nearest branch of Taco Delight.”

2. Ground “near” language in a hyperlocal context. Don’t only optimize for “near me” and “nearby” terms; take major locations, landmarks, and destinations into account. Examples could include “near Union Square,” “near downtown,” “near Civic Center,” “near San Jose 101 freeway exit,” “near Sunrise Mall,” etc. 

In a multi-location context, each landing page on the website you’re marketing offers multiple opportunities for “near”-type optimization. The goal is to incorporate the keyword phrases you’ve discovered in a way that matches real user intent without sounding awkward. 

Optimize for service-in-location (SIL) queries without duplication

Here at Search Engine Land, we have an entire section devoted to the rollout of Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU), which launched in mid-2022. If you need a refresher on this major update:

• The HCU is particularly notable because it is a sitewide signal, meaning that the algorithm is evaluating overall site quality, rather than just the quality of a single page. 
• In Google’s own words, the HCU devalues content that “content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.”
• In 2024, the HCU was incorporated into Google’s overall core ranking system. 

In the local SEO context, a question that has arisen out of the HCU rollout is whether chains and franchises need to be concerned when large sets of landing pages have identical service menus. 

For example, if 300 branches of your plumbing shop franchise all have the same service menu (leak repair, drain clearing, septic servicing, etc.), then you might be worried that you’ll somehow be penalized for publishing the same menu across 300 landing pages. Here are three things to know:

1. Do not worry about a so-called “duplicate content penalty.” Unless you are scraping and copying content from other websites and publishing it on your own, you likely have little to worry about. Google wants to see that your pages are helpful to human beings, and, of course, the people in each community you serve need to see your service menu; even if it is the same across all your locations.

2. However, given that the HCU is a sitewide evaluation, brands and marketers should give lots of thought to whether their landing pages are actually helpful, or if the company has gotten into a poor habit of publishing large volumes of thin, unhelpful content that doesn’t really deserve to rank well organically for searchers seeking assistance and answers.

3. The way to avoid creating a website filled with thin, low-quality landing pages is to invest in publishing a rich selection of content that has been customized as much as possible for each community being served.

You need have no worries about your basic service menus being the same across all properties if you’re going the extra mile to create an excellent consumer experience on each landing page. Here are our top tips for varying local landing page content:

• Come up with a list of content blocks supported by your CMS or website developers that can contain unique content for each landing page, customized for each community.
• This can include unique media, like photos, videos, and podcast episodes.
• Your list should definitely include unique first-party and third-party reviews for each branch.
• Make use of location-specific sales and special offers that rotate across the brand.
• If there are unique conditions (regulatory, climatic, cultural, etc.) that are applicable to certain communities, incorporate them into the main text content of specific landing pages. For example, a landscaping franchise will start offering its spring cleaning special much earlier in California locations than in Minnesota, or a general contractor might need to explain different building codes to customers in Oregon and they would in Texas. 
• Where e-commerce and product inventory are involved, real-time local inventory features are gold!

Tap into voice search queries with question-based local keywords

Is voice search finally becoming “a thing” in local search? It’s a question that has to be asked, because the roadmap of voice search has looked rather like this:

• Voice search earned a massive amount of buzz a decade ago with claims that it would change the way everyone searched.
• In the local SEO world, experts gradually concluded that the impact of voice search was minimal, and that you basically just needed to practice good SEO to be seen as a relevant result; there wasn’t much extra you needed to do.
• Voice search has become one of those object lessons in the SEO world in which we learn never to buy into hype too much at the outset of new technology and features; it always takes time to see how things play out (a good thing to remember as we’re currently being barraged with claims that AI will change the world forever).

All this being said, it’s worth watching this video short in which Uberall’s Krystal Taing asks Whitespark’s Darren Shaw whether voice search is actually starting to have some traction in the local search arena. Darren Shaw predicts,

“While traditional Google searches usually consist of separate keyword queries, AI searches look like full-on back-and-forth conversations… Google’s new AI Mode will likely become the default search interface in the near-future, and when that happens, people will get used to using conversational search instead of keyword search. I don’t think it will be too long before we are running many more queries by talking to our phones/watches instead of typing them into a search bar. It’s just so much more natural once we’re all used to searching conversationally. Although, I think it will be a while before voice search becomes a useful experience for local searches.”

Whether or not this interesting prediction proves true, voice search has significant hurdles to overcome in the local search dynamic, because consumers need to be on-screen to look at business photos, watch videos, and interact with listing elements. 

That being said, if people will increasingly be using voice search to get quick local answers in response to queries like, “where can I get my phone fixed in downtown San Francisco?” then your keyword research and optimization should take question-based and conversational queries into account. These queries tend to be longer than traditional search box queries and use of tools like AlsoAsked and AnswerThe Public can help you identify opportunities to become a voice search answer by creating content based on question-oriented language. 

As always, never assume that your business location is understood by any third party. Be sure your answers combine both the solution to a customer’s question and the location of the business (e.g. not just “we have vegan tacos,” but “we have vegan tacos at our San Francisco location”). 

Map target keywords to different intents along the customer journey

This tutorial on understanding local search intent will teach you the basics of differentiating between informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional intent. As you’re undertaking local keyword research, bucketing discovered phrases by intent will enable you to create different types of content to serve local customers in your target audience at different phases of their journeys. 

Informational intent

For example, a person searching for “how to plan a beautiful wedding in Boston” is at an informational stage of their journey. They could be looking for recommendations of businesses, of course, but they are more likely to be looking for stories, photos, and videos of other local weddings to inspire them. So many components could contribute to a wedding being considered “beautiful” (think garments, flowers, locations, music, ceremonies, etc.). If you are marketing an event center that hosts weddings, your content needs to be inspirational to meet this intent, proving that you’ve provided the setting for lots of beautiful weddings.

Commercial intent

The same searcher has reached a very different phase of their journey once they are looking for “wedding venue Boston.” They could be at a commercial intent stage, wanting to compare different event centers in their city. Your content at this stage might need to be comparative for the local area, proving that you can host very large or quite intimate weddings, that your facility is ADA-compliant, pet-friendly, near to specific houses of worship, well-priced, or extremely experienced.

Navigational intent

If the same searcher then narrows down their preferences to perform a branded search, like “Hampshire House Boston,” they’ve reached the navigational phase of their journey and may be re-visiting your site for a final evaluation of its offerings. At this stage, first-party reviews from past wedding parties could persuade them to make a final decision in your favor. 

Transactional intent

Finally, a keyword search like “book wedding Hampshire House Boston” would indicate that the searcher has reached the transactional phase of their journey and is ready to rent your premises. They might be looking for your Google Business Profile in order to click-to-call you (meaning it’s vital you’re actively managing your listing so that your GBP accurately connects to your current phone number), or they could be hoping their search will bring up the event booking calendar on your own website.

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The takeaway here is to evaluate all discovered keywords by imagining the searcher intent behind them. Use this intent to map a content plan that meets as many intents as possible with unique and satisfying content. This could include:

• Multimedia local business listing content (contact info, photos, videos, reviews, product listings, menus, etc.)
• Website pages, blog posts, guides, FAQs, tools, widgets, photos, videos, galleries, contact information, forms, infographics, podcast episodes, etc. 
• Social media content
• Unstructured citations that affirm your qualifications and quality

Don’t overlook zero-volume keywords with clear local intent

A final important note for anyone using keyword research tools to investigate local demand: you will frequently encounter these tools reporting that geo-modified searches (e.g. “event center in X small town”) have zero volume. This does not mean no one is searching for these phrases. Instead, it typically means that the tool simply lacks data about search behavior in every possible city and town in a state or country. The same holds true for businesses in niche categories. If you offer something highly unusual, keyword research tools may simply lack information about how people are searching for it. 

The takeaway here is that, even if a tool you’re using says “0,” you should still make use of any discovered term you feel is highly relevant to your business and its customers. You have the final say and the most hands-on experience in how your community speaks and searches. You’ll be in good keeping with both high standards of customer satisfaction and Google’s own policies if the content you create has been sensitively and thoughtfully built for the people you serve.

Next up: if you’ve published content based on your local keyword research but haven’t yet earned the local and organic rankings you need, learn how to do a local SEO audit to improve your visibility.