Last Updated on January 6, 2025

Local keyword research can be tricky since there is not a single tool/platform that can do it all. Certain tools, such as AHREFS, are great for keyword research in general but are unable to target specific locations. Other tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, can target specific locations but don’t provide Keyword Difficulty, among other things. This makes it so that we need to use several different tools to achieve our desired results. We have created a “Local Keyword Research” template which can be found in the Sebo Template Gallery.

Create an Initial Keyword List

First, we need to create an initial keyword list. We want to make sure we cast a wide net so that we catch all keywords with potential:

  1. Determine which keywords you are going to be researching. Enter keywords into column A3:22. If you need more than 20 keywords, you will need to insert a row between rows 3 and 22 (gray cells). Don’t put anything in cell A23 or below
    1. For example, if your client were an auto mechanic shop, you might choose “auto repair”, “car repair”, and “auto mechanic”
  2. Determine which locations you want to research. Enter locations into row 2B:2Z (gray cells). Again, if you have more locations, you need to insert a column between columns B and Z.
    1. For example, if your client has locations in American Fork, Provo, and Spanish Fork, you would definitely want to include those. The MC may tell you exactly which locations they would like you to do keyword research for, but if they don’t specify, you also should do research for a few nearby cities such as Orem, Lehi, or even Utah County
    2. Make sure the “state” and “state abbr” are replaced with “utah” and “ut” (depending on which state you’re targeting)

**Note: The template is going to output 6 different variations of your keyword/location combinations. Make sure you copy all of them when copying the column.

Qualify Your Keyword List

Now that you have an extensive list of keywords, we need to do some research to see which of them are worth keeping. You can do this in 2 quick steps:

  1. Open Google Ads Keyword Planner
    1. Click “Get search volume and forecasts”
    2. Copy and paste the keywords from your “Keyword List” sheet into the Keyword field
      1. Do this column-by-column (in other words, location-by-location)
    3. Click the “download” button to export the data to a spreadsheet
    4. Identify the keywords that have any amount of monthly volume (at least 10) and delete the rest
  2.  Paste these keywords into the Column A in the “Qualified Keyword List” sheet
  3. Go through the keyword list. Select the 3-5 best keywords. Consider volume and relevance. If you are researching several different keyword/service types, try to make sure that you pick enough keywords to represent all of those keywords/services.
    1. Paste your chosen keywords (including the location and monthly volume for those keywords) into the “Final Keyword Data” sheet
  4. Repeat these steps for each location

Finalizing Your Research (Localized KD and DR)

Open AHREFS

  1. Navigate to “Keyword Explorer”
  2. Paste in your “ahrefs keywords”
  3. Refresh all keywords that need to be refreshed
  4. Reference the KD column — copy each of these keyword difficulties over to their corresponding cell on your “Final Keyword Data” sheet
  5. Back on ahrefs, click the “SERP ↓”. This will bring up a SERP of page 1.
  6. Go through the SERP
    1. Find the number of ranking pages that have a DR that is 5 above of your client’s DR or lower. Put this number into Column E
      1. i.e. if your clients DR is 10, count the number of websites on the SERP that have a DR that is 15 or lower
    2. Do the same thing for Column F, but look for the number of websites with DRs that are 10 above your client’s or lower
  7. Repeat this process for each keyword