Why Keyword Selection Tools And Competitor Analysis Are Essential In Local Maryland Seo

By Author: Sue McCrossin
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Keyword Research for Local Maryland SEO

Keyword research is the starting point for local Maryland SEO, especially for small or local businesses. Even if the small business owner believes that he or she knows the best keyword phrases that people use to find their business, these assumptions can lead them down a less successful path in their internet marketing efforts.Instead of making assumptions, local Maryland SEO should begin with strategic keyword research based on statistical facts.

As with traditional keyword research, the local Maryland SEO keyword research process should begin with a list of the keyword combinations that the business owner suspects are going to bring in leads. For instance, the name of the business, the nearby cities, states, counties, zip codes, and the products or services offered should be tested in various combinations and added to a spread sheet.The goal of this part of the research is to brainstorm all the various terms people could use to search for the business.You should also look for any synonyms and colloquial phrases that people might use for your ...
... products and services.

Once you have your list of phrases, you can begin to check their search volume and competition. Local Maryland SEO keyword research can be difficult because local phrases have relatively low search volume, and many keyword research services don’t have the data, and will report back “insufficient search volume”.

Local keyword research is important is because using the most searched phrases the business can focus local SEO to get better qualified leads. There are some tools, which can help, in local Maryland SEO keyword research. For instance, Google Insights, Google Adwords Keyword tool and Google trends are free tools that show search traffic and usually have information on local phrases. Other keyword research tools like Trellian’s Keyword Discovery have so little data that they tend to skew the results because their data comes from smaller search engines and ISPs, so it is just a subset of the entire internet.

Now that Google has started to show local results for broader keyword phrases, by using the searcher’s IP addresses to discern their location, it is becoming less necessary to add the city name in your optimization. Searchers will likely stop typing in the city name during their searches, and we will be back to making assumptions about local phrases. However Google Insights does show the search volume for the phrase by country, states, and major city.

Once you have completed local Maryland SEO keyword research, you still need to decide if these phrases are worthwhile to optimize for. You can do this by looking at how competitive these phrases are. There are two steps to competitive research. First determine how many pages are already optimized and indexed for the phrase, and then check to see whether there is at least one poorly optimized website ranking for the phrase on the first page of Google.

Looking for a poorly optimized site can be done quickly by putting the search term in and using a tool to check each site on the first page of Google for incoming links (look for any less than 100), google page rank (look for any less than 3), has the keyword in the title and description META tags (look for any that do not), etc.Indicate each phrase with a weak site indexed.

On the same spread sheet you used for your keywords you can add the following fields: Google broad match (search for the phrase in quotes and record the number of results), Intitle (search intitle:”keyword”), Inanchor (search inanchor:”keyword”), intitle & inanchor (search intitle:”keyword” and incancor:”keyword” to show sites with optimized titles and incoming links anchor text), and #1 site for the term.

After you finish the spreadsheet you can sort it to show you the best results that will give you the most searchers with the least competition. You can also search to see who your main competition really is, and see if you can rank quickly above the site that is poorly optimized for that phrase.

Sue McCrossin is owner of Boomtown Internet Group, and is interested in educating the general public about MD SEO and local search marketing. For more information on Maryland Search Engine Marketing visit our website.