Local Keyword Research: How to Choose the Right Local SEO Keywords

A local keyword is a phrase that carries place: named outright, implied by proximity, or resolved by Google from the searcher’s device. Choosing the right ones for a client’s Google Business Profile (GBP) decides the competitors it is benchmarked against, the rankings you track, and what its content is written for. You choose the keywords by testing each: is the volume real, is the local pack contestable, is one customer from it worth the effort.

Get it wrong and nothing looks broken. Your local SEO software is doing its job correctly on the list you gave it, so the profile quietly competes against the wrong businesses, surfaces for browsing phrases instead of buying ones, or doesn’t surface at all because nothing in the profile matches what you targeted.

How tightly that list is wired in varies by tool. In Localo it sits behind all three jobs, which is why the cap is ten. This guide works each of those tests against real client profiles, covers how short to keep the list, and closes with what Localo’s analysis of 131,862 tracked keywords found keywords don’t do: title and description placement tracks with a small gain, while review and photo count track far more strongly with position. So you can stop spending hours in the wrong place.

What are local keywords and what makes a keyword local?

Local keywords are keywords aimed at a business that can serve someone where they are. What makes it local is how the phrase carries place, and there are three ways:

1. Place is named in the phrase. A service or product plus a city, district, street, or zip code. E.g., “window cleaning baltimore” or “matcha shop portland or”.

   

2. Proximity is named and place is implied. There’s no location in the phrase, but it carries an explicit marker that the searcher wants something close. E.g., “24/7 laundry,” “electrical supplies near me.”

   

3. Nothing named at all, just search intention. Someone searches “coffee shop,” and Google resolves it by device location, returning a map pack.

   

💡Tip: As users ask AI for recommendations, including local-specific keywords in content can also influence the way AI perceives your client’s business. Read more in this article: How AI changed local SEO in 2026

While there are just three main ways for keywords to carry local intent (featuring place, proximity, or local intention markers), combining them can generate multiple variations of the key phrase to choose from. Google doesn’t need the exact string because it matches word stems, so a profile built around “plumbing” can surface for “plumber”. That comes from Localo’s own analysis of 131,862 tracked keywords, and the exact figures are at the end of this article.

You’re not choosing between every grammatical variant of a service or product, but between distinct things people search for. The following section explains how to decide which local SEO keywords are worth targeting and competing for.

How to choose local keywords that customers search for?

Follow these three steps in the list below to choose local keywords based on what customers search for:

1. Create a list of local keyword variations based on the three main patterns (place, proximity, and local intention markers)
2. Check what keywords the client’s business currently ranks for
3. Choose between generic and location-specific keywords based on estimated volumes

1. How to build a local keyword variation list that mirrors what customers search for?

Keywords of the first kind, place named in the phrase, are where the list starts. They repeat a handful of shapes:

• service + city, e.g. “hotel columbus”
• service + district, e.g. “venue rental san fernando valley”
• service + neighborhood, e.g. “coffee shop capitol hill”

You should decide which pattern works best for your client based on the services or goods they offer and their local area, because the boundary isn’t set by Google, but by how far someone will realistically travel for the thing your client sells.

For example, a health clinic located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, can target all three patterns, as their customers:

• could be traveling specifically to the clinic in NY from afar
• could search for a health clinic in the specific area of the city
• could be nearby and want to check where the clinic’s entrance is

so they might type all three patterns, e.g.: “health clinic ny”, “health clinic williamsburg”, and “health clinic brooklyn”.

On the other hand, a coffee shop located in the same area should focus on “coffee williamsburg”, as nobody will travel far for an espresso.

You can watch this decision get made below.

On an onboarding call, a specialist from the Localo team went through a user’s own profile keyword list for a gîte they own in Pyrénées-Atlantiques. The services were right, the geography was named in every keyword, and the location named was their actual one. Everything the formula above tells you to do. The problem was volume. Every keyword on the list drew fewer than fifteen searches a month.

They confirmed it from the ground, with something the keyword review couldn’t have revealed:

“Mourenx is the village that we are in… it doesn’t have that many searches. Sometimes in the summer it has as many as 70 per month, but not so much during the rest of the year.”

Then they proposed the fix themselves and changed the city to the region targeted in their keywords:

“Bayonne, as you may know, is the region that we’re in… that is more competitive because there are a number of other [gîte] businesses in the Bayonne as a whole. So that probably is a better one to try and rank for.”

They took a harder region on purpose, because a keyword nobody searches is worth less than a keyword you have to fight for. A correctly built keyword list can still be the wrong list.

2. How to check what keywords the local business currently ranks for?

Find local keywords your client already ranks for in their existing Google Business Profile or check the keywords their website ranks for in Google Search Console.

Here’s how to find keywords in the Google Business Profile:

1. Go to the client’s Business Profile and click Performance.
2. Select a time period: six months is the default and the maximum limit.
3. Find the keywords under “Searches breakdown.”

You can try Localo’s free local rank checker tool to see your client’s and their competitors’ rankings in SERPs and Google Maps. Doing that lets you see the positions your client’s GBP now has for the keywords listed in the report.

Here’s a three-step way to find keywords in Google Search Console:

1. Open Google Search Console.
2. Search for the “Performance” tab and navigate to the “Search results.”
3. Under the “Queries” section, you’ll see the keywords your client’s website appears for in SERPs.

3. How to choose between generic and location-specific keywords based on estimated local search volume by city?

Higher generic keyword search volumes can be misleading, since they compete nationally rather than locally. For example, searching for “pizza” can return pizza places in your area, but it can also show pizza recipes from cooking blogs.

The intent mix behind a head term like that is wide, and it doesn’t always trigger a local pack to claim a spot for your client’s Business Profile. Don’t underestimate location-based keywords, even if they have smaller search volumes.

Use tools listed below to estimate local search volume for specific keywords:

• Google Trends is free and shows search trends by country, city, and region.
• Google Search Console is free and reports clicks and views for specific phrases by country, provided the client’s website is already connected to it.
• Ahrefs and Semrush are paid, and give exact search volumes by country.

Are “near me” keywords still effective?

Google uses location signals from the device to return more relevant results, whether or not the phrase names a place. [Google Privacy & Terms, How Google uses location information]

That’s why “near me” keywords carry less weight than they used to: the words duplicate what the device already supplies. It doesn’t make them worthless. Check their volume in the client’s niche, and give one a slot only if it beats whatever else is competing for one.

How to do local keyword research for multiple locations?

The first thought is to build one list and duplicate it across every city with different location modifiers. But there are things that change from one location to the next:

• Your client has a different set of competitors in each location, even if you use the same keywords.
• If they have a business in a large city like Seattle, the city name will have a big search volume; in a small town, the county or region name might bring more searches.
• Differences between regions may influence how people search for a specific service or product: a keyword can matter in one location but be ignored in another.

Because of the reasons above, run the process per location, not per client:

1. Make a list of your client’s core services or products. That’s the only thing that duplicates per client.
2. Create a list of location modifiers, including the target locations: states, cities, neighborhoods, or proximity-markers only.
3. Emulate local SERPs in each location for these target keywords to make sure they trigger the local map pack.

It’s time-consuming work, but don’t feel tempted by shortcuts. Copy-pasting location keywords between clients is a bad idea that won’t deliver the results you want. Two dentists in the same city still have different review counts, distances from the searcher, and different profiles.

In Localo, you set the keyword list per profile, not per industry or region. In the next section, you’ll learn how that list of keywords decides who your client’s direct competitors are.

Which competitors does your keyword list put your client against?

Your client’s target keywords define who their main competition is.

Let’s say your client has a boutique medical aesthetic studio in Cambridge, MA. It’s a highly specialized business, and keywords they’d like to target include “medical aesthetics clinic harvard square”, “medical aesthetics clinic cambridge,” and “medical aesthetic clinic boston.”

Each of these local keywords triggers a list of your client’s potential competitors. The first, “medical aesthetics clinic harvard square,” puts the client against studios within walking distance: a handful of businesses, most of them roughly their size.

The second, “medical aesthetics clinic cambridge,” widens to every clinic in Cambridge, which brings in operations with far more reviews and longer histories.

The third, “medical aesthetic clinic boston,” reaches across the river.

The client didn’t change. The competition did. The competitive set is per-profile, not per-vertical.

A list of key competitors shows you which keywords drive their traffic. Evaluate if your client has a chance of ranking alongside them or outranking them in top positions on those keywords by assessing their profiles:

• Are the local pack and top positions filled by established businesses, or are they new profiles?
• Are they nearby businesses or large national brands with a local page and profile?
• What’s their reputation?

Reading the pack that way is what saves you time later, when you’re deciding which of these keywords to keep.

💡Tip: If you’re managing the client profiles in Localo, this is the set the GBP Audit benchmarks against: five nearby leaders, chosen for the keywords you select, with the profile scored against them. Which means the comparison isn’t fixed. Swap a keyword, and you’re being measured against a different five.

Which keywords offer the highest chance of success?

The instinct is to sort by broad, high-volume terms and work down long-tail local keywords with lower search volume. But focusing only on the volume doesn’t guarantee success. Volume on a broad keyword is a mixed number, so more searches isn’t always better.

For example, users searching for “house cleaning” may be looking to hire someone to clean their house or for tips on home maintenance. Both land in the same pot, but no ranking converts the second group.

You need to assess three things in this order: is the volume real, is the local pack contestable, and is one customer from it worth the effort.

How do you decide a local keyword with high volume is too competitive?

By checking local SERPs for this keyword. If the top three spots in the local pack are dominated by GBPs with hundreds of recent five-star reviews, nationwide franchises, or directory aggregators such as Yelp, move on for now and check another.

You’re not taking just one position. The local pack is drawn around the searcher, so the same profile can sit in the top three for someone downtown and nowhere at all for someone a few miles out. The question is whether you can get your client into the pack where their customers are.

How to identify long-tail keywords for local SEO?

Here’s the method most guides give. Take the client’s core services, add the city or neighborhood, stack a few modifiers, and you have a low-competition list. You’ll also have a list of phrases nobody types.

A Localo user, a floor restoration company in Cleveland, had built their list almost exactly this way: one service, a different city each time:

“We have hardwood floor refinishing. The keyword is basically the same. We just added a city.”

When the Localo team went through the profile with them, eight of their ten keywords drew fewer than fifteen searches a month. What they then read off the screen is the part worth keeping:

“If you look at these keywords that are on your monitor, for the top ones with the cities it says less than 15 searches. And then the dustless floor sanding is about 200 searches. The hardwood floor refinishing Cleveland is 40 searches. And the bottom, the wood floor refinishing service is 350.”

Look at the order. Their highest-volume keyword is the longest and most specific one on the list, and it names no city at all. The same service with a city attached draws a ninth of it. Whatever separates a winnable keyword from a dead one here is vocabulary.

“Some people don’t even know what refinishing means. Some people search for hardwood floor sanding or floor sanding and staining. You know, they search differently.”

The industry word and the customer word are often not the same, and the customer word usually carries the volume. That’s what you’re hunting for: the phrasings of people who want the service or goods.

So the method for finding long-tail local keywords runs like this:

1. Collect the ways customers describe the work, from the client’s own inquiries and phone calls, from the GBP performance report, from the competitor profiles you read in the last section.
2. Check each one for volume before you add a city name.
3. Add geography only where the local variant holds up. Sometimes it will. Often, the bare service phrase is the stronger keyword, and algorithms handle the geography by assessing the location of the searcher and profile.

When is a low-volume long-tail local keyword the right call?

It’s worth going for lower-volume keywords when they include a clear intent to hire or buy, especially when local competitors’ GBPs aren’t optimized for that keyword. It’s even better when your client’s service margin is high, and even a single job from a low-volume keyword can bring in revenue.

How many keywords should you choose?

Localo allows you to add ten local keywords for your client’s GBP. Why just ten? A Google Business Profile is not a website. The content you can add to a profile is limited. Think of the keywords list as a budget that you want to spend on things that drive revenue.

Stemming is why the cap doesn’t sound so bad. Because Google matches roots rather than exact strings, the ten slots don’t have to cover “plumber” and “plumbing” separately. One of them carries the rest. Ten slots spent on ten distinct things people search for give you a clearer read on performance than ten spent on one thing worded ten ways.

Should you import a list built by someone else?

You can review the keyword list your client brought you, but you shouldn’t follow it blindly, especially if you don’t know how it was created. It could include overly broad phrases that your client has little chance of ranking for.

Follow the steps outlined in the previous section: check each keyword for relevance and local pack triggers, search volume, and the competitive set it triggers before including it in the final list.

Does changing the keyword list change the Google Business Profile?

In Localo, the keyword list is an input within the app, not an edit to the Google Business Profile. Nothing on Google moves because you edited a list. Anything that reaches the profile, like a rewritten description or a published post, is a separate action you take deliberately.

Should you change the keyword list frequently?

It’s not a good idea. Localo recommends it’s best to keep the list stable for at least three to six months so you can monitor GBP performance over time and see what needs to be fixed to deliver the intended results. If you change the keyword list too often, you won’t be able to track the results of your work.

What to do once you have a list of local keywords for your client?

Once you’ve created the local SEO keyword list, you can start working on your client’s profile. In Localo, the keywords you choose feed three jobs:

• whenever you measure local SEO metrics, e.g., in the GBP Audit tool that runs weekly automated checks against the keywords you select and compares the Google Business Profile with five nearby leaders ranking for these keywords. The complete local SEO audit guide covers what the rest of that audit checks.

• whenever you analyze data, e.g., use the Local Rank Tracking feature to monitor your client’s GBP ranking for selected keywords

• whenever you manage a GBP, e.g., while creating Google Profile posts or updating business description.

What local keywords can and can’t do?

Localo’s study on the top local SEO ranking factors matched 131,862 actively tracked local search keywords against each profile’s title, description, review text, and last ten posts, using five matching methods: exact phrase, all words, any word, and stem matching on four- and five-character roots. The analysis checked whether Google Business Profile performance depends on keywords and, if so, how much.

These are our findings:

Profile area	Strongest match	Effect	Weakest match	Effect
Description	stem-4, any word	+4.6pp	all words	+0.5pp
Title	stem-5, all words	+4.0pp	any word	+2.3pp
Posts	stem-4, any word	+1.8pp	any word	+0.2pp
Reviews	exact phrase	+1.6pp	any word	−1.0pp

Only two areas produce an effect: keywords in the description and title. Descriptions lead, and the trigger is a stemmed four-character root rather than the exact phrase.

Now the areas that show nothing:

• Keywords in review text show nothing, so don’t coach review wording.
• Keywords in the domain: profiles with one rank top-three 70.1% of the time, against 70.2% without. That’s a tenth of a point, in the wrong direction. The same check put HTTPS at 70.0% against 70.9% for plain HTTP.
• Keywords in the URL path hold flat at 12–14% prevalence regardless of position. We measured that one as prevalence rather than a top-three comparison, so read it as “no pattern found” rather than a scored null.
• Location keywords in post text produce the only negative reading, at −0.1pp.

To put these results in perspective: the strongest keyword effect in the study, +4.6pp for a stemmed root in the description, is smaller than a single step in review count. Profiles moving from 21–50 reviews to 101–200 track with +11.8pp. Photos run on the same order: profiles with more than fifty photos hit a 71.3% top-three rate against 62.4% in the 21–50 bracket, with review count held constant.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore keywords in local SEO. They are the necessary basis of GBP benchmarking, tracking, and content optimization, the three jobs this guide has just walked you through. What they don’t reward are the four practices above.

Is it safe to put keywords in the business name?

No. Google’s business name guidelines prohibit adding keywords, locations, or slogans to a business name, so the only title available to you is the client’s real one, and profiles get suspended for ignoring that. [Google Business Profile Help, Guidelines for representing your business on Google] The +4.0pp in the table above describes businesses whose legal name happens to be descriptive, like “Johnson Family Dentistry and Orthodontics” against “Johnson’s”. That is a correlation to understand, not a lever you can pull. If a client pushes for it, that’s the trade: suspension risk against a ceiling of four points. The keyword stuffing page has the definition if you need it.

The description is where keyword choice is genuinely yours, so write it naturally and let stemming do the work. Reallocate the rest of that time to getting reviews and uploading photos. The study’s own conclusion is that they run five to ten times more impactful than any keyword placement.

FAQ about local keyword research

How many keywords should a Google Business Profile target?

Google sets no limit, but a profile holds far less content than a website, so a short list concentrates the optimization: Localo gives each profile ten slots, and stemming means one entry already covers “plumber” and “plumbing.”

Can you trust keyword difficulty scores for local terms?

No, because standard SEO research tools, such as Ahrefs, display keyword difficulty scores based on national or global backlink metrics, not local competition and local SERP features. [Ahrefs, What does KD stand for in Keyword Explorer]

When to use location in keywords?

Use location when the local variant has real search volume, when the generic term lacks clear local intent, or when the generic term’s local volume is smaller than the location-specific one’s.

What local keyword research tools should I use?

Google Trends and Google Search Console are free and cover local keywords and volumes, while Semrush and Ahrefs are paid and add competitor data.

Next step

Open the three client profiles you’d least like to lose and count how many of their ten slots go to city variants of the same service. On most lists it is more than half, and the slots you free up are the ones worth re-spending.

Sources

• Ahrefs, What does KD stand for in Keyword Explorer
• Google Privacy & Terms, How Google uses location information
• Google Business Profile Help, Guidelines for representing your business on Google