Hope to see you here again.
Miriam

See, and that’s not something you’d intuitively expect, Dave, though I suppose it would depend on the nature of the search. I can imagine searching for ‘Audubon Society CA’, but not ‘pizza California’. I guess the type of business will influence, naturally, to some degree, whether state or city is more prominent, but your data shows that state names may yield much great traffic in some instances.

That’s really neat.

You blow me away, Dave.
Miriam

Thank you for taking the time to share what you know. Hope to see you here again.
Miriam

Over 5300 searches

the site is highly ranked in engines for the generic business terms and of course the local terms.

Most searched phrase, over 400 searches

most searched local/regional phrase 39.

I scanned hard over search terms that had hit the site at least twice.

Of that I counted 18 different variations of applicable business terms with an appropriate geo phrase. This is a site that works 2 state names and a city name and it is a large market. Business wise it can draw customers (not many) from 2 nearby metro markets. I had previously checked the metro regions population totals and between 3 smsa markets there is a population of about 7 million + so it appeals to a pretty big market.

Then I did a re review to look more closely at the impact of organic search traffic that was very local.

Of the search phrases that had a local context (the city name or an appropriate regional/county/town name that included a business service phrase there were 441 searches (i.e. I excluded the phrases with state names since some of those people were looking from too far away.

Then I scanned the single visit phrases. I stopped counting at 70 visits for a phrase that represented a nearby town/county name/zip code with the business service.

So for the most recent 1 month period I’m looking at well over 500 search phrases that represent a purely local context, at least.

We get more search phrases by far for the state names than the city names and I’d guess that at least 30% of those searches are within the geographical reach of this business. (It could be close to 50%)

Anyways this doesn’t answer your question but it sort of speaks to the long tail of adding content to capture a lot of phrases.

I think all the methods above to pull search terms are appropriate. My experience is that I’d use a search for the generic business terms without the local geography phrase and just start adding content than optimize for the most important combinations, based on guess work.

If your client will be willing to run an ad campaign I’d do that: even without hits your getting estimates on impressions and visits and that gives you insights on how and where to optimize.

Dave

Dave,
Now, the trick with your extremely good route will, of course, be getting clients to understand the importance of expanding their website so that multiple terms can be covered. So often, small businesses are looking for small sites – 5 pages or so. That’s not going to cut it if you’re looking to cover dozens, scores or hundreds of phrases.

This is why I love to advocate the addition of a blog to a business site because of the ability it gives the siteowner to continuously expand the keywords they are covering, widening that ring around the bullseye ever farther.

Great stuff, Dave!
Miriam

My main point is that for a local/regional buisness there may not be a measurable amount of traffic for most keyword tools. Wordze, of course uses an enormous database, and it appears that seodigger also uses an enormous data base and presents the information differently.

Keyword expansion is the key to drawing lots of traffic regardless how tiny the traffic for the main phrase might be.

I like all the suggestions above, but my experience dictates that in a variety of industries there are a lot of applications of the secondary keywords for a generic business term, and within that geography there are many searches of the generic business term and logical geographic areas.

In my example above, if I broke it down to one state, the single most active business term with the state name might deliver 40 visits, but I’m getting about 600 total visits with the state name and a variety of business terms. A couple of relatively highly trafficked terms, might include the main business term and the state initials, and the logical variations of state name first, main business term 2nd; state initial first main business terms 2nd and then searches with the main business term first and the state name or initial 2nd. But even after those big 4 variations, I still might have all of 100- 120 searches out of a total of 600.

The bulk of traffic is coming from variations on business terms.

Another way to expand traffic for a region or a county might be to add town names within the county onto the content of the site. I don’t know the towns in California counties, but in Maryland/Montgomery County, I’d add content that includes Bethesda, Silver Spring, Germantown, Rockville, Olney, Wheaton, etc.

That adds traffic with some searches representing searches for the business term and town names. Cripes, I’d add zip codes …some people search for a service and add their local zip code. I’d add regional phrases that are used, for Chicago, I might add “the loop” to content, and for my area I’d add Southern Maryland specifically to content.

I really like the ideas above for ascertaining the usage of a business term and the geography….but I also like using generic terms for a business service from any basic keyword tool, ensuring that you are adding all the secondary terms and then just adding all the geography you can into the content to try and show up for any type of search in the area.

Frankly, Will’s example of weak links working for a local business also gives insights into the wide variety of 2ndary terms that might be applied.

Now, several months after starting an AdWords campaign for which I had to do a lot of guessing, I not only have a lot of data from the campaign itself, I also have loads of data via the keywords tool.