How To Find And Target Keywords For Your London-Based Business

After reading this guide you should have some idea of local keywords research for London based businesses or any other area based business. Keyword is a search term that a user puts in Google search bar to look for answers.

Let me summarize the article for you. First, you need a main keyword for your business with the area that you want to target i-e London in this case. Second, you need to find out the search volume (search volume is how many times a keyword has been searched on Google per month) for the keyword. Third, you can find the search volume using tools like Keywords Everywhere (I recommend), Ahrefs, Semrush, MozPro, etc.

Fourth, you need to find related keywords for your products/services which you can find out by competitor analysis, manual research, and tools research. Finally, you need to group keywords of similar intent together for content writing and authority building around the topic of your business so the Google knows you’re an expert in that subject which helps your organic ranking.

If all of this sounds too difficult to implement, it’s best to hire a London based SEO consultant to manage your website.

What does Keyword Research for London Mean

Before we move on to the real topic, let’s first discuss what keyword research for London-based businesses actually means, and why we are doing it. We do local SEO keyword research to find keywords that people search when looking for products and services in the area where your business is established. Since you are reading about local SEO, you might also find this article “Why Local SEO Is Important For Small Businesses“, useful.

The purpose of keyword research is to boost the search engine ranking of your brand, increasing both online and physical visits as well, which ultimately helps generate more sales. 

For example, if you provide plumbing services in London, you should always add the keyword “plumber in London”, instead of just “plumbing service”. Because you want to attract traffic mainly from London, it helps search engines understand and show your business to the right people.

Now, we will discuss the steps to discover keywords using multiple methods.

Discover New And Related Keywords

This is the first step to finding the right keywords. There are various methods to do keyword research. But first of all, you should have the initial ideas. And that’s very easy if you already know your business’s main search term that the users are searching.

For example, if your business is about Pet Care Services. You already know the important insights about it. Such as what type of pet services you provide, like pet grooming, pet training, and pet nutrition etc. 

You can start from your service intent keywords and then expand the research into relevant informational keywords as well.  You can use these informational intent keywords to address what problems your customers face the most and how to solve them. This is also marketing your business because when you provide valuable information, people trust you more. 

After making use of your current knowledge, you can use keyword research tools like Keywords Everywhere, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or the Google search bar autocomplete feature to get further ideas. You can also do competitor research using the same tools to find out which keywords are getting the most traffic.

Your first priority should be to focus on transactional keywords because these are closely related to the service you provide. To learn more about intent, below are detailed examples for different businesses with service-based intent and informational intent keywords:

Example 1:
Business Type: Home Services
Transactional Intent: House cleaning, Carpet cleaning, Window washing, Moving services, Handyman services
Informational Intent: How to clean carpets, best house cleaning tips, DIY window washing, moving checklist, home maintenance tips.

Example 2:
Business Type: Health and Wellness
Transactional Intent: Personal training, nutrition coaching, yoga classes, massage therapy, mental health counseling.
Informational Intent: Benefits of personal training, healthy meal prep ideas, yoga for beginners, stress relief techniques, mental health self-care tips.

Example 3:
Business Type: Automotive Services
Transactional Intent: Oil change, tire rotation, brake repair, car detailing, battery replacement.
Informational Intent: How often to change oil, signs of brake failure, DIY tire rotation guide, how to detail your car, battery maintenance tips.

Example 4:
Business Type: Food and Beverage
Transactional Intent: Catering services, meal prep, food delivery, private chef services, baking classes.
Informational Intent: How to plan a menu for events, healthy meal prep recipes, catering trends for 2024, what to look for in a private chef, baking tips for beginners.

Example 5:
Business Type: Education and Tutoring
Transactional Intent: Math tutoring, language lessons, SAT prep, art classes, music lessons.
Informational Intent: Study tips for students, how to improve math skills, benefits of learning a second language, SAT preparation strategies, how to nurture creativity in kids.

How to Find New Keywords and Their Search Volume

To find out the search volume of a specific keyword, simply put it in the Keywords Everywhere tool and you will have the exact volume. You can use other tools if you like, but I personally use the Keywords Everywhere tool for search volume metrics. You can get the global volume and also narrow it down to the country-level volume for better understanding.

Manual Technique

Simply put in your main keyword in Google’s search bar, and after your main keyword start typing from A to Z one by one. For example, your main keyword is “catering services in London”, now what you want to do is type this keyword in search bar and write A after that, you will see some keywords suggestions from google.

You need to have Keywords Everywhere turned on during your research to get instant search volume of suggested keywords. Repeat this process from A to Z and you will be amazed by how much you were missing.

Competitors Research:

When you type the keywords that you want to rank for, you will see the websites of other businesses providing the same services. They are your competitors.

What you have to do is copy the exact page URL or main website URL and put it in “Domain Overview” section of tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or MozPro, etc. These tools will give you the keywords that your competitors rank for and which keywords are generating traffic for them. You can extract the exact keywords that you need to target with search volume and other metrics.

I recommend you repeat this process for at least 5 to 6 competitors who appear in first page of Google search results.

Research Tools:

Just like we used “domain overview” feature of the tools I mentioned above for competitors research, there is another feature of “keywords research” in every SEO research tool. What you have to do is simply put in the main keyword in search bar of the tool and click search.

You will be amazed to see how much data these tools have. These tools will show you a complete list of broad match keywords related to your product/service that you can group together and choose to target if suitable for your business.

Group And Filter The Keywords

Now that we have gathered all the important keywords and saved their search volumes,  it’s time to group them together and choose the number of articles we want to create targeting those keywords for optimising content and building authority of the website around that topic. Using sheets is a good idea. Keyword qualities and how to sort them for creating content are described below.

Similar Intent Keywords

After researching the keywords, you will come to know that some keywords have similar meaning (intent), for example, “London grooming pet”, “pet grooming London”, or “pet grooming service in London”.

You should group these similar keywords together and create one single page about it rather than creating separate pages for each keyword. Because Google understands the intent, and creating a separate article for each of these similar keywords can cause the content duplication problem which would adversely affect the SEO of your website. 

Content Writing

After researching and grouping, the final step is writing SEO optimised content to cover the topic comprehensively so that it not only helps the user but also ranks in Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).