How to Choose Keywords for Local SEO: A Step-by-Step Method

In brief: choosing keywords for local SEO means starting from the services you actually offer and your business category, distinguishing implicit proximity from explicit geolocation, then assigning each keyword group to a page or to the appropriate business profile.

Prerequisites: what you need to gather before choosing your local keywords

Before opening any tool, start by drawing up a complete list of the services your business actually provides. Written down in black and white, this list is the foundation for everything else: it stops you starting from ready-made phrases that correspond to nothing concrete in your business.

• Access to your Google business profile, to check the category currently selected.

• A free Google Ads account, solely to use theKeyword Planner: no paid campaign is required to access it.

• Access to Google Search Console if your website is already live, so you can later compare your assumptions with the queries actually observed.

• A precise definition of the geographic area you serve: towns, neighbourhoods or the radius within which you operate around your location.

With these four elements in place, you have everything you need to move forward methodically, without guessing or copying a generic list found elsewhere.

Step 1: List your real services and refine your business category

Write down each service you sell exactly as it exists in your business, without starting from keywords you already have in mind. This is a different exercise from keyword research: the aim is first to describe your offer, not to guess what people type.

Next, choose the primary category for your business profile: the one that best describes your business, and as precisely as possible. According to the Google Business Profile help centre, categories describe what a business offers, help it reach customers searching for its products or services, and influence local ranking. The same principle applies to selection: keep only the number of categories you genuinely need, rather than stacking them up to cover more keywords.

These listed services and this chosen category form the reliable starting point for all your local keyword work. This, and not a tool, is where the process should begin.

Step 2: Identify whether your target queries rely on implicit proximity

An implicit proximity keyword is a search for a service that mentions no location, but which Google nonetheless treats as a location-based search, relying on the user's position. Google gives the example of a mobile search for "Italian restaurant", with no town or neighbourhood, to find nearby businesses.

Do you need to include your town name in your local keywords? Not necessarily. Local results rely on three factors combined: the relevance of the service to the search, the distance between the user and the business, and the prominence of the profile. Including a town name is just one wording option among others, not a requirement for appearing in local results.

For each service listed in the previous step, note three families of wording: with no location at all, with an explicit town or neighbourhood, and centred on the need or problem to be solved. Then assess separately the intent of each variant and the area it genuinely represents, because wording without a location does not mean national intent.

Good to know

If the user does not share their location, Google relies on the other information available to it to estimate the relevant area. Wording without a town name is therefore never automatically an "out-of-area" search.

Step 3: Adapt your geographic terms to your type of business

The right geographic signal to work on depends directly on your business model. Google distinguishes three set-ups, each with its own rules for displaying the service area.

Physical address open to the public

When customers come to you, the address shown on the profile is a strong signal. Your geographic keywords then work around that location and the neighbouring districts or municipalities whose residents actually visit.

Hybrid business

A hybrid business welcomes the public at an address, but also makes home visits for part of its activity. It must therefore combine keywords tied to its physical address with keywords tied to the areas it travels to, without confusing the two approaches.

Home service

A local home-service business does not receive customers at its premises. For this model, the profile can display the areas served when users search for the business or its category on Maps or Google Search. You should therefore never assume that an address open to the public is automatically the right signal to work on: what matters here is the area actually covered by your visits, not a commercial ambition.

Step 4: Generate keyword ideas with precise geographic targeting

Open Google Ads Keyword Planner and enter your priority services, your business category and, if you have them, the URLs of your most relevant pages as starting points. According to the official Google Ads documentation, this tool is used to find new keywords related to products, services or a website, and to obtain monthly search estimates.

Systematically restrict ideas and estimates to the country, region or town under study rather than relying on a national estimate: Keyword Planner lets you target countries, territories, regions and towns, and even suggests locations near the one you enter. If you serve several areas, test each catchment area separately, because volumes and dominant wording can vary from one town to another.

• Note the location, language and period used for each extraction, so that you can compare results over time.

• Keep only the wording that corresponds to an offer you genuinely provide: strong volume on a service you do not offer will be of no use to you.

Step 5: Prioritise by genuine relevance rather than volume alone

Relevance, as Google uses the term, measures how well your profile or page matches the query typed by the user. Complete, detailed information helps Google understand your business and show it for searches that genuinely relate to it.

Discard or downgrade any keyword that corresponds to a service you do not offer or an area you do not serve: the traffic it generates will never turn into customers. Then sort the retained keywords by service, urgency, type of problem, type of customer and area, which makes the next step, assignment, easier.

High volume never guarantees good performance. Google states that performance also depend on the bid, budget, ad quality, geographic targeting, the product concerned, abuse-related trends, and customer behaviour specific to each sector. So weigh estimated volume, fit with your offer, the target area and the real ability of your page or profile to convert before making a decision.

Key takeaway

Prioritise using four criteria combined: relevance to your real offer, the area actually served, the ability of the page or profile to convert, and estimated volume last, never first.

Step 6: Group your keywords into clusters and assign them to the right destination

Bring together the retained keywords by intent and by service, to form coherent groups rather than isolated, unconnected lists. Each group should then be matched to a specific destination: a service page, a genuinely informative local page, or the business profile where the service can be entered.

Cluster assigned to a service page

A keyword group centred on a specific service, with its variants of need and urgency, naturally belongs on a page dedicated to that service. That is where the content can detail how the service works, the cases handled and the associated guarantees.

Cluster assigned to the business profile

Google allows certain categories, notably service businesses, to display their services directly on the profile: when a local customer searches for a service you offer, it can then be highlighted. It is better to enter your real services in the profile's services editor than to create purely lexical groups with no associated content behind them.

This assignment step is only one chapter of a complete local SEO method, which also covers the technical optimisation of the website and the business profile as a whole. Create a separate local page for a town only if it provides genuinely differentiating local content, offers or proof: otherwise, it is better to consolidate the cluster on an existing destination.

Step 7: Measure your results and adjust your local keywords

Once your pages and profile are live, open the Search Console performance report to identify the queries that show your site and those that actually generate traffic. This report is designed precisely to track search traffic and identify these two categories of queries.

Filter the data by country, device (mobile in particular, which is highly representative of local behaviour) and period, to analyse genuinely local behaviour rather than an aggregated result. Google gives the concrete example of a filter combining country equals France and device equals mobile.

Then compare your initial keyword list with the queries actually observed, and add those that are relevant but that you had not anticipated. Fix pages that attract traffic poorly aligned with your offer, and periodically review the categories and services displayed on your profile so that they remain consistent with the keywords you are working on.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Choosing profile categories solely to target keywords or attributes, instead of precisely describing the real business: Google explicitly prohibits this practice and recommends selecting as few categories as possible, as precisely as possible.

• Believing that a local keyword must contain a town name to capture proximity searches, which ignores the implicit proximity mechanism covered in step 2.

• Relying solely on estimated search volume to prioritise a keyword, without checking whether your offer can genuinely meet that demand.

• Forgetting to adjust your keywords after launch because you are not monitoring Search Console regularly.

Point to watch

Duplicating the same page for each targeted city for the sole purpose of capturing geographic traffic is explicitly listed among Google's examples of doorway page abuse: multiple pages or domain names targeting specific cities or regions that funnel all users to a single destination.

Practical tips to go further

Review your list of local keywords at regular intervals, particularly after any change to your services or the area you cover: an evolving offer often makes part of your earlier work obsolete.

• Test phrasing with and without the city name to see which terms actually appear in the local results that matter to you.

• For each cluster, document the chosen destination page or listing: this avoids internal duplicates and uncertainty when making future updates.

• Involve the teams who deal directly with customers, by phone or in store, to gather the vocabulary people actually use, which is often different from what you imagine from behind a desk.