The Advantages To Ranking Locally VS Nationally

There is more to keyword research than just picking keywords with the highest volume and CPC. In this guide I will go through how to do local SEO keyword research, and rank in Google Maps, organic, and Craigslist.

The advantage of local SEO is that you are mainly only competing with other people targeting the same geo location. That means that right off the bat your money keywords and secondary keywords are often easier to rank. The simplicity of ranking that term will generally have to do with the highest keyword search volume and CPC in that particular geo location. For example “carpet cleaning London” is a lot harder to rank than “carpet cleaning San Bruno”. One of the reasons that the London keyword is more competitive is because there is more money to be made by ranking that term, so there are probably a good amount of affiliate SEOs trying to rank for it. Secondly, there are more businesses competing for the top spot and the marketing budgets for those businesses are forced to be a little higher.

Even though the keyword difficulty seems to be somewhat on the high end, the map pack competition is low enough for me to assume it is relatively easy to rank higher on Google maps.

4. Do all of the listings in the first 4 or 5 Google Maps results have websites attached? In this case we can clearly see that the third listing does not have a website and is ranking. If you create a listing with a strong expired domain, you should be able to overtake this ranking.

5. What are the categories of the businesses that are currently ranking? Are they relevant to the search term we put in? In this case, only one of the business has the category “Asbestos Testing Service” and that’s probably the main reason that that listing is ranking. In fact, the top ranking listing has a category that appears to be incorrect. They most likely meant to put “Environmental Consultant”. When optimizing your GMB listing, make sure to max out your categories with as many of them as possible that accurately describe your business.

6. What do the backlink profiles look like for the websites attached? In this case the top 2 have a decent backlink profile, but the last one doesn't even have a website, so by optimizing everything else we should be able to rank.

7. What is the on-page like for the websites that are ranking? The only website with a decent and relevant on-page to the search term is Titan Environmental Services. The middle one is irrelevant to the search term, and the third one doesn’t even have a website.

After this analysis, rinse and repeat to find more terms from the related searches list at the bottom of the search results.

“asbestos testing kansas city” seems like a good one to try.

Although at first glance this may look like a somewhat competitive 3-pack, take a look at the city in the third listing. It is not in Kansas City, and the search term has “Kansas City” in it. Therefore, Google would probably like to show a business in Kansas City if they had a viable option. Additionally, the on-page is lacking quality content. This, in my opinion, can easily be out ranked.

We go over this in more detail in our rank and rent and local seo lead gen article, but here is a brief explanation. When looking at local keyword research tools for ranking in organic search results, you should look for high ticket search terms that do not bring up the map pack, and/or those with a KD score of 2–20 in our difficulty tool. For example a good one in the water damage restoration niche is “water extraction + city”. Even though keyword search volume tools may tell you that these search terms have 0 search volume, you can still get traffic off of them, especially if you are ranking at the top for many different geo modifiers.

Google is currently not filtering duplicate content when used in a local SEO context, so take advantage of this by using mass page generators! Here is a good example:

In my opinion, advertising on Craigslist with pay-per-lead local service offers is the easiest way to make money online. It requires next to zero technical knowledge, and you can get started with it right away! So, How do we make money posting ads on craigslist without selling anything?

In my experience (and yours might be different), I have found that good Craigslist local lead generation niches are often low/medium ticket, high volume, and high converting for the business owner like:

The main downside to Craigslist is that there are some tire kickers on there who price shop, but if you advertise services that cost under 1k or so, they will be more likely to convert. Let’s say I choose to go with fence services.

So let’s draft a title: “Fence Repair & Fence Installation Company”. I would then proceed to put the keywords in the description as well as a couple times towards the top, if possible. You can get more in-depth information about writing your ads by reading this article, but you can test various formats by simply using different call tracking numbers in each one. What I have generally found to convert well are personable ads. You can do this by including a picture of your lead generation partner and including their name in the ad.

If you do not have a Craigslist local lead generation partner, I recommend using a few royalty free stock images. If you do have a partner, I’d recommend asking them for photos and a head shot.

Craigslist is most effective if you can post very often (at least three times a day). After you have got all of the above together, it is time to try to post in bulk, which you can achieve in 2 main ways:

And that is it! You can scale to $200/day pretty easily with this as a beginner and establish some good client relationships.

Using these local SEO keyword research strategies and tools you should be able to rank in all of these local mediums. Enjoy!

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