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By: John Devlin
SEO Tradesmen
Due to you probably being new to local keyword research it may take you 10 or 15 minutes, but you can do it too.
If the content on your website matches the keywords searched by the user then you have a chance of appearing at the top of search engine results pages.
In this case, the top of Google.
You won’t be guaranteed anything, several other critical factors go into any successful SEO campaign, but it’s the first step.
When done right it can easily be enough to get a local tradesmen website moving up the rankings, with hyper-local keywords (smaller towns and villages) it can be enough alone to hit the top five search results.
One thing is for sure, a website targeting the wrong keywords will struggle and will almost certainly be leaving money on the table.
So we need to get this right.
Let’s dive in.
For example:
You get the point.
(You want one of the top cities in your country)
We ignore our cities, towns and villages because, with local keyword research, the data from even the best keyword research tools will be too low.
I live near Newcastle with nearly 250,000 people in and around the city alone.
Of course, there will be loads of people searching say “Electrician Newcastle” but these keyword tools don’t start recording until they have at least ten exact searches every month.
Bear in mind, everyone searches differently, and the way they search varies.
Searchers looking for the above electrical business might type the following.
And so on.
So as you can see, search volumes start to get diluted.
Meaning keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush struggle to collect enough data for smaller cities and towns.
In a city like London, With a population of nearly 9 million people the data collected is a lot more accurate, and we can see which would be the best keyword to target for our page.
Note – To do professional keyword research and get this right first time you are going to need to use keyword tools, like everything the best tools are not free.
In my opinion, Ahrefs is the best keyword research tool out there are and our use it every day. Their packages start at £99 a month, but they do offer a $7 – 7-day free trial which should be more than enough for you to complete this exercise.
If you don’t want to sign up for the trial and pay the $7 then there are loads of ways to do free keyword research out there. I will link to some great resources below.
Things to note:
Ignore listing sites like YELP, Home Advisor, Checkatrade, Yell, Rated People and any other site that has a long list of companies.
Ignore the map pack.
Follow the images as I go through the process for a local drainage company.
Hover over the listing, right click the mouse and select copy link address.
So yes, we are going to take a look at a company in the same industry like ours, pitching for the same services we want just in a much larger city.
Top left click site explorer, you should go to this screen.
Right-click, paste the link address copied earlier in here.
Set the drop-down in blue to URL and hit the orange button.
So, the Ahrefs keyword tool will look at just the keywords this top-ranking page appears for and not all the keywords that the site ranks for.
Bear in mind this site might have 20 services and cover 8 locations, we don’t want all that data, well not yet anyhow.
Add the location in the blue square box, in my example London and uncheck the box next to it “URL”, so we only see keywords. Click apply.
Now we have the correct list of keywords and these are the most important search phrases people type in for our business, there will be one or two in there that are not relevant like words around “jobs” but we can just remove those from the list.
Click export and download the list to an excel spreadsheet.
I use Google Docs for everything, but if you use excel, you can do this to it.
Delete out all columns of the spreadsheet keeping
Filter column B to show the highest value first and you should end up with something like this.
And this is why we do keyword research!
Who knew that the most searched keyword for drainage company was “blocked drains”
Most people would have thought it would be drainage services or something like it.
Click the first column and follow these instructions.
Enter your city or town in the “Replace with” box and hit replace all
In this case, I have changed London, to my town Gateshead.
This way, I have all the top searches for a drainage company in Gateshead that no tool would have given me due to lack of data.
If you are a drainage specialist, then go ahead and use these keywords for your homepage or main location page. There good!
If you have followed all the steps, you will need to move on to the next part of the process.
How To Use Keywords On a Page.
Last note: This is the process of finding tradesmen keywords is for your leading service.
You can repeat the research for all of your additional services and go on to build a fantastic website built on solid keyword research and one that search engines will clearly understand.
Good Luck
SEO Tradesmen
With over 20 years working in the home improvement industry, I have successfully transitioned from a small trades business owner to a digital marketer. I knew very early that the secret to growing a trades business would rely heavily on learning scalable lead generation strategies and marketing the business better than others online. This blog is where I share everything I learned (and continue to learn) on my journey.
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