Article By Bogdan Krstic
Fact-checked and written by a human ✔️
It’s ironic that the most important part of SEO is overlooked in 99% of cases. Businesses just put up what they think people are searching for on their website and hope for the best instead of validating their decision through keyword research.
Today, you’ll learn how to do proper keyword research for your SEO campaigns and what to do after you’ve found your keywords. Let’s jump right in!
Overview
First, we’re going to dive into keyword research for restoration companies located in bigger cities. Once we’re done with that, we’ll show you how the process looks like for businesses operating in smaller cities.
And finally, we’ll go over some additional tips and what to do next.
Ready, set, go!
Bigger Cities
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Let’s start with Keyword Planner. To use this tool, all you need to do is create a Google Ads account. Once you’re done, navigate to the Keyword Planner.
Once you’re there, you’ll see two options. Start with Keywords and Start with a Website. If you already have some keywords in mind, you can go with the first option.
If you’re brand new and have no idea what to do, just plug your website into the tool and you’ll be presented with keyword ideas.
Note that in most cases, your target keywords will be general keywords like water damage restoration {your city}. So, it’s pretty safe to proceed with analyzing these types of keywords.
Once you enter a few keywords, you’ll be presented with a bunch of ideas.
You’ll be able to see different data points like average monthly searches for the particular keywords, average CPC, and competition level. Note that Google is displaying the paid advertising data, not SEO data.
However, if the competition is high in paid search, then it’s pretty safe to assume that the organic competition is pretty high as well.
Overall, Keyword Planner is a great way to find keywords but you should not end there.
Autosuggest
There’s another cool Google’s feature you can use to find keywords – autosuggest.
You see, whenever you start typing something in Google and you get automatic suggestions for your search query, that means that people are also searching for those terms as well.
This way, you can find a lot of keyword ideas quickly.
There’s one last way you can do keyword research that we will cover – using Ahrefs.
Ahrefs is an SEO software that you can use to do all sorts of crazy things, not just keyword research.
Using its Keywords Explorer feature, you can generate a lot of keyword ideas and get a nice overview of how hard will it be to rank for a specific keyword.
As you can see, we’ll need backlinks from around 11 websites to rank for mold removal miami. Take this data with a grain of salt though – it can be incorrect.
For example, we know from personal experience that the keywords like mold removal miami will take a lot of hard work to rank and are nowhere near easy.
This is why going through multiple keyword research tools is so important.
But Ahrefs is pretty good at finding keyword ideas. You can also use it for auditing websites, analyzing competitors, and so much more.
Smaller Cities
When doing keyword research for smaller cities, you may end up seeing all zeros in keyword research tools.
In most cases, that data is not correct. People will always need home repair services, regardless of where they live.
The way you estimate whether people are searching for a keyword in a smaller city or not is by comparing it with a similar keyword in the nearest bigger city.
Using Google’s autosuggest feature helps immensely in these cases.
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Additional Tips
Google Ads
The best way to do keyword is research is to run a few Google ads campaigns.
When running ads, Google will show you all of the keywords people had used before discovering your ad.
This way, you’ll get a pretty good estimate of how many people are searching for a particular keyword per month and are these people converting into leads.
Google Search Console
Once you get started with SEO, make sure that you start using Google Search Console – GSC.
Over time, GSC will provide you with a lot of data, including keywords people are using to discover and click on your website in search results.
This way, you’ll be able to see which keywords you may have missed at the beginning of your SEO campaigns.
Don’t think that if you don’t get it right from the start, you can’t fix the situation. You can.
Got it. What to do once I’ve found my keywords?
Learn exactly that and so much more about SEO for restoration companies.
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Bogdan is a restoration SEO expert with over 3 years of experience helping businesses grow. He is passionate about the restoration niche because of how underserved it is, and RepairSprout is the business he started and works on with joy every day. When he is not helping restoration companies grow, he works out, takes long walks, and watches Suits, which is completely ironic given how rarely he dresses up in a suit himself.