Getting search engine traffic depends on targeting qualified visitors - web site visitors who want to buy or do business because of your location will often specify local keywords when utilizing the search engines. To capture this traffic, you have to know how broad your keyword phrases should be to make search engine optimization efforts produce great results.

Traffic from major search engines doesn’t only come from one and two word phrases. Those two word phrases are probably going to be very competitive in your niche. Instead of trying to expend resources on those exclusive keywords, branching into keyword phrases that target local search could provide the SEO advantage you need. Like luring any potential customer/client - it’s about what words will capture their attention. The more keywords entered into a search engine query, the more potential there is to connect with that visitor.

The example I’m going to look at here is for local search terms in Omaha. Instead of expanding upon the Omaha day care example I use in my free report (see the request form on the navigation menu), let’s look at a business that might be looking for customers or clients within a 25 mile radius of Omaha, Nebraska. Can you think of all the cities or communities this might include? That’s where consulting with a search engine optimization consultant can pay off for your keyword research.

To give you an idea of how much local search is happening, take a look at these keyword estimates from Yahoo! for plumbing contractor :

You can see from the yellow highlighted areas that the majority of the search terms listed from the Yahoo!/Overture tool have city names. (OK, I admit, I didn’t highlight all of them because that seemed overkill) - but take notice that the last one listed is a state - Washington. Even a larger region, such as the entire state of Washington, still narrows and qualifies the visitor to your web site. More qualified visitors are what bring better conversion ratios.

The knowledge to take away from this is example:
Local search terms can provide targeted traffic.

Looking at the Omaha metro area, the idea would be to gather as many terms as you think would be appropriate. Gathering these keywords is the foundation of attracting a diverse amount of traffic. This is especially useful for pay per click campaigns or the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) when considering search engine optimization. Google offers a zip code targeting feature in their pay per click - but how can you discover the cities that covers, or create a keyword list from it?

There are many tools and databases out there can assist with that job - but this article is not about reviewing those keyword aids. That will be a topic for another article. I’m not going to present a complete keyword list for a 25 mile radius from a zip code in Omaha - but I am going to list a some terms that you might not normally think of. So here are keyword phrases that might be entered into a search engine query when considering a plumbing contractor in the Omaha / Council Bluffs metro area:

Now this is a very unoriginal keyword list - the point is these keyword phrases are all valid potential search engine queries when targeting potential clients or customers in a 25 mile radius of mid-town Omaha (zip code 68106). Several phrases that stand out to me are the ones at the bottom of the list - such as Millard, Dundee, Benson, or west Omaha. These are not terms that are going to show up on a zip code search - because they are technically Omaha, Nebraska. Just like Elkhorn was recently annexed into Omaha, Millard was annexed years ago - but the community still has its own business identity. Dundee and Benson also have noted business identities.

The second column takes the same list and ads the abbreviation for Nebraska - NE. This doubles the keyword phrase list size. And utilizing the full spelling of Nebraska would triple the original list size.

This type of information can be very useful for pay per click campaigns where you can specify the exact phrase that must be entered into the search engine for your ad to display. Overtime, keyword phrases that have noticeably more clicks in pay per click advertising can be targeted for search engine optimization - so you can cover both the natural and the paid advertising space on the search results page.

So get your keyword list together and start making a plan on what areas your really trying to reach in your market. Or contract out the work to build the list for you - either way, local search has great potential to bring you web site visitors wanting to do business with you.