411 Locals Keyword Research Part I: The Evergreen Method of SEO & Content Marketing

Let us take a deeper look into the keyword research. What are keywords? Those are the phrases the users enter in the search engines. With them they can find our websites and we, as SEOs and content marketers, must provide them with the best content possible. But the real question is “How to find those keywords?” All of us have some targets, websites, services to work for. This following method should be your starting point;
Keyword Planner

This is the basic tool you’re going to need. It will always be part of your future research, so it's essential to know how to use it. Just remember, this is not the actual search of the phrases. Those numbers are based on AdWords (ads in Google). There are four options you can choose from:

1. Search for New Keyword and ad group ideas;
2. Get search volume for a list of keywords or group them in ad groups;
3. Get traffic forecasts for a list of keywords;
4. Multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas;

You will mainly use the first of the aforementioned. The second is for search volume only. The fourth is great when you want to combine words. Let's check option number one.

Your product or service is the place where you enter your keywords. You can add them on different rows or with commas. Your Landing page is the place where you can add a URL, but more about that later. Targeting is the location you are targeting. You can choose the city – London, Sydney, Austin, or you can choose a bigger region – Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, etc. Negative Keywords is the place where you put words which you don't want to appear in the suggestion box. E.g – you want results for “carpet cleaning Las Vegas”, but you don't want results like “rug cleaning” to appear. In the negative keywords you enter “rug”. It won't show in the suggestions any more.

Keyword Filters – Here you get three options. The first one is Average monthly searches – you can choose whether the results to have a volume lower or higher than the value you have entered. The second is suggested bid, which is used for PPC campaigns. Ad impression share is also not so important from SEO point of view. But the bottom menu – Competition, is quite significant. Here you can choose the competition of the phrases. High means it is harder to rank for this word, Low is easier.

Keywords to Include – if you want some words to be in the suggestions, add them here. If you use the example above “carpet cleaning Las Vegas”, you can place “carpet” in this box. Now every suggestion will contain the phrase. This is how your result page should look like. Let's start from the top. Modify search is where you can change the phrases you have entered. Search volume trends is when you want to check how the same phrases work for mobile searches. 

Then you have Ad group ideas and Keyword ideas. What you should be more interested in is the second option. Here is where you can check each of the phrases you've entered and their average monthly searches as well as the competition. You can hover over the “?” boxes for more information. That chart icon shows you the search of the keyword for each month for the past year (when you hover). At the bottom you will see the suggested words. There could be hundreds of results. Use the filters to get the most on-point ones.