How To Do A Keyword Research For A Local Domain, And Then Some…

…just wanted to share this method to do a keyword research for a local site. However, I also wanted to emphasize that this is not a detailed keyword analysis to setup your internet marketing strategy or a campaign.

Rather than explaining the process, I wanted to use a step-by-step example as follows.

Let’s say that we are going to put up a blog about SEO, and this blog is going to be about local SEO in Atlanta (I just picked Atlanta out of blue).

So our base keyword is SEO, and rest assured, “seoatlanta.com” or “atlantaseo.com” are already taken. So we need to go out and generate variations of our keyword with high search volume (and low competition, if we are so lucky).

Let’s start with Wordtracker to generate variations of our keyword (you can start with any of the services that I will be showing). To keep things a little simple for this example, I selected the following keywords:

Side Note: I decided to put pictures of the keywords to avoid keyword stuffing to get penalized by Google for having a “highly optimized site” just for the purpose of “ranking higher” in the search results 🙂

Next, I am going to generate more variations from these keywords by using Keyword Discovery. That research came up with a lot more, and I selected some more relevant keywords. So the list of our keywords became as follows:

Just so that we haven’t missed any variations, I ran above keywords through SEMRush… and the list is below:

We end up with 71 relevant keywords to SEO. Now we need to see how we are going to implement this to Atlanta. So I take the keywords and create two sets of keywords by putting Atlanta in the beginning of the keywords and at the end of the keywords (i.e. “atlanta web seo”, and “web seo atlanta”, etc). That gives me 142 keywords (71×2).

To see which keywords are applicable for Atlanta region, go to Google Adwords an put all of those 142 keywords in, and run it with the option “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”.

Whola…! You have 17 keywords with local monthly searches as shown below:

Now that you know how many monthly searches you have on these keywords (you should also dig deep to see how many competitors you have, and even go further to calculate your KEI), it is time to see if any of these domains available (we already know two are not). Go to GoDaddy bulk domain registration and put them in to see which ones are available. At the time of this article, the only one available was localseoservicesatlanta.com. Nevertheless, from this point on, you need to play with the keywords (it seems keeping “atlanta  seo” or “seo atlanta” in tacked is a good idea) to come up with your domain (i.e. northern atlanta seo, central atlanta seo, etc…)

Let’s take this little further and talk about your off-page optimization, where one of the most important factors is to use the variations of your keywords in your anchor text, right??? I am sure you get the idea by now. Do more digging and come up with your KEI to determine the variations of your keywords that you should be using. When you are building your backlinks, consider those variations that are relevant with high KEI (please note, “consider” is the keyword here. KEI is just a simple indicator. It is not something magical to put your whole faith in. You need to depend on the most valuable asset when you are deciding on these things,,, which is Your Brain!)

… do you have any other techniques to share with people.. let us know… quite sure they’ll love it!