I covered a few local SEO tips last week to help you find your . Obviously you’ll be ranking for your own brand keywords, so you don’t have to put any work into that because if someone searches for your business name then you’ve likely already won the battle in more ways than one. Your time is better spent trying to rank for local SEO keywords.

Local SEO Keywords

Local SEO keywords are characterized by their qualifier of having a specific location whether that’s a town/city, state, region, or even a country. Having that qualifier returns your specific search results as they relate to whatever area you’ve searched for. There is less competition on the local keyword level because the number of SEOers and plain number of websites are reduced significantly.

Your example would be “Miami steak house” or “St. Louis tattoo parlors”. The geographic qualifier significantly reduces the competing web pages and a search like that tells Google to bring up their local listings.

Be Specific

You can’t get away with simply targeting “your location + keyword”, however. That’s a good start because this is what most people will be searching for, and those are the keywords you should use on your main page and sprinkle all over your site, but you should go deeper with your keywords.

This means adjectives like “best”, “greatest”, “top”, “leading”, and other descriptive words like “delicious”, or “cheap” if they apply. Think outside of the box and put yourself in the mindset of people in your area who would be searching for you.

Don’t forget variations of the basic presentation of your local SEO keywords. So instead of Philadelphia lawyers, try also targeting lawyers in Philadelphia, best lawyers in Philadelphia, “divorce lawyers in Philadelphia”, “Philadelphia divorce lawyers”, etc.

Don’t Get Too Specific

Huh? I just told you to be specific and now I’m contradicting that by telling you to do the opposite. What I’m getting at is that while you should be specific with the qualifying keywords which relate to your city, state, or region, when you’re dealing in local SEO you can’t get away with the same number of phrases as you can in global SEO.

So while you might target a phrase like “the most delicious pizza” in global SEO because there are enough people searching for pizza globally to make it likely that someone is searching for that exact, precise phrase and consequently worth your while, in local SEO it would be a waste of time to put time into targeting a very specific phrase like that. Assume that your local crowd is just focusing on more basic local searches so you don’t have to add too much.

Final thoughts – just like longtail keywords on the global level, you want to get more specific when it comes to local SEO keywords, but you don’t want to go quite as longtail in local SEO as you’re already reducing the number of people searching for your keywords significantly by adding the geographic qualifier. Focus on words like “best location keyword”.