Using Geo-Modifiers for Local Search Marketing and Lead Generation Success

As discussed in my last post, finding the right keywords for your search marketing campaigns is essential for getting the right traffic to your web site at the right price. But many small and midsized businesses should also consider adding geographic keyword modifiers to their search campaigns to really target their search marketing campaigns. In this post, we’ll define geographic modifiers and discuss why they are important to localized search marketers.

What is a geographic modifier?
A geographic keyword modifier is the use of a geographic term in the beginning, end, or in the middle of a keyword term. For example, if my core keyword was “health insurance,” you could geographically modify the keyword by adding the term “Denver” to it, making it “Denver health insurance” or “health insurance Denver.”  Pretty straight forward, eh?

Why would I use a geographic modifier?
Even if a business wants to appeal to searchers on a national basis, it’s not a bad idea to start out by targeting a local market, because they will be able to see better results more quickly. Why? Because competition can be fierce on the national level, and the timeline for success can be considerably longer.

An unscientific way to assess the competitive landscape is by Googling your keyword and viewing the total number of results. While this number does not express the amount of search marketing competition per se, it does give a good indication of how many web pages have been found on the Internet that could fulfill a search for your search term.

For example, the total number of documents (web pages, PDFs, etc) in the Google index for a term like “health insurance” is 105,000,000. That’s a lot. Even though a majority of those pages are not well optimized for that term, the web pages are still competing for a space in those search results.

Now, let’s add some geographic modifiers for a state, city and neighborhood and see how that number of indexed pages change:

- Colorado health insurance (state modifier) – 24,300,000 documents
- Denver health insurance (city modifier) – 16,100,000 documents
- Denver Highlands health insurance (neighborhood modifier) – 149,000 documents

As you can see, as the geographic area gets smaller, the number of web pages and other documents goes down as well. This shows the big advantage of geo-modifiers: a reduction in keyword competition.

Geo-modifiers give you the ability to target a specific local or regional market, and this means you can get results more quickly and get a faster ROI on your search marketing efforts. It also means you can focus on the areas that are most profitable for your business.

Starting local can get you from start-up to success quickly.  And if you want to go national right away, go for it, but consider doing it in a two-pronged approach where you target your local market with one campaign (including a local website) and another where you go for the whole nation.  That way you’ll be able to profit in the short term while waiting for long-term national success to kick in.

How do I choose the right geographic keywords?

So now that you have an idea of why you would want to use a geographic modifier, you might be wondering how to pick the right modifier for your business.

Sometimes it’s obvious. There are many businesses that are geographic dependent, such as sales people with a specific territory or a brick-and-mortar store that has limited regional draw. But other times it’s not so obvious.

Some companies that are able to operate in many locations struggle to define the geographic area that they will market to. This can be tricky, but one good way to make this decision is to ask the following question:

What is the smallest definable geographic area that I get or want to get 80 percent or more of my business from?

Is it your city? Your state? Your neighborhood?  Think of the answer to this and write down 3–5 potential geographic areas that would fit this definition.

Once you have done this it’s time for you to check and make sure there is search volume in your area for these search terms. Go to the Kutenda tool or another keyword tool, and plug in your keyword along with each geographic modifier (e.g., “Denver health insurance” or “Colorado health insurance”).  Check the monthly search volume on these geo-modified keywords and pick the one with the most volume.  This should be your primary geographic modifier.

Now that you’ve got your primary geographic modifier, it’s time to make a list of secondary modifiers. Secondary modifiers can come from a number of different sources based off of your primary keyword:

1.    Other nearby major cities
2.    Cities/towns within your primary modifier (if it’s a metropolitan area, etc)
3.    Adjacent states, counties, metro areas
4.    Neighborhoods within your primary geographic area

As you did with the primary modifiers, write down as many of the secondary geo areas you can think of and plug them into the Kutenda keyword tool along with the primary keyword you are using.  Check the search volumes for the words and then make a list of the highest volume locations you want to market to.  It’s good to have 10– 5 of these, if not more.

When you’re done, you’ll have a list of your geographic modifiers—congrats!  But what do you do with them? In the next post, we’ll discuss how to use these modifiers for search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising and local search engine optimization.  And no, the use is not the same for all three.

If you have any questions about this post, feel free to leave a comment below.  Thanks for reading and please remember to take action and succeed online with Kutenda!