Keyword research for local SEO should start with what your customers search for when they are looking to hire a business like yours. Unless you are trying to reach a specific niche customer within your industry, it's best to start with more general terms.

Here are some examples. Your type of business with "near me" added is a good place to start if you're still not sure what your customers are searching for. Don't worry, in the next step we will use this as a start-off point for finding more keywords.

We are going to use Semrush to identify competitors as the next step.

Putting in your keyword then choosing your location by city  will give you city-specific data. At the top you can see the local metrics which include the search volume and keyword difficulty.

If you scroll down you will see the top-ranking sites for this keyword in the SERP analysis section. It is best to focus on other local businesses as competitors, not directory sites like Yelp, Angie's, or Super Lawyers. Click on the competitors to open their website in a new tab. I recommend choosing 3 or 4 competitors.

Next, head to the keyword gap section and enter in your website and the websites for your chosen competitors.

Now Semrush will show you the keyword your competitors are ranking for that you are missing or have weak rankings for. You can filter for different types of keywords depending on the goal of your keyword research. For example, if you are looking for money keywords to focus on, you will want to filter for only commercial keywords.

Semrush shows you the keyword, intent, your rankings, competitor rankings, national search volume and keyword difficulty. There are other elements here but these are the most relevant ones for SEO. Hovering over a competitor position will show you which page on their website ranks for that keyword.

So what do you do with this information? What's next is really up to your goals. Some of the processes that I will use next are:

Export the document and categorize the keywords by topic. If I have an existing page that is ranking for this topic, that would be the page that I would optimize for these keywords.

Another option is to categorize your keywords by topic and then find which topics your competitors have content for but you do not, then create content with the intent to rank for the keywords you have identified with Semrush.

As you can see, I prefer to work with topics and not individual keywords. Focusing too much on individual keywords often leads to accidentally creating competing pages on the same topic or over-optimization that causes poor rankings for other topically relevant keywords that aren't as optimized.

This also prevents from there being too much of a focus on search volume for individual keywords. Focusing too much on high volume, high difficulty keywords often leads to lackluster results. If your competitors have spent months as the top-ranking site for this keyword while putting in consistent effort into SEO, spending 15 minutes on additional optimizaiton isn't going to be enough to overtake them. It will take consistent effort over a longer period of time and likely a focus on link building and internal linking for that page in addition to content improvements.

I hope you found this guide to keyword research helpful. Thanks for watching!