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.

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Selecting the Right Keywords for Search Engine Marketing

Here’s a fundamental concept that all budding search marketers need to understand: How to choose effective keywords for your online marketing efforts.

While approaches and strategy change from medium to medium (search engine optimization keywords vs. pay-per-click keywords vs. local search keywords) there are some fundamentals of keyword selection that work across all types of search engine marketing.

Defining Keywords
Before we jump into the actual keyword selection process, I want to define what a keyword is in a search engine marketing context. So, in the context of this description, we’ll refer to a keyword as:

A single word or multi-word phrase that is used when searching for information on a search engine.

Even though “keyword” seems to indicate that it’s only a single word, such as “insurance,” it can also be a short phrase, such as “auto insurance,” or an even long phrase like “my grandmother wants to buy auto insurance for her 1982 Buick.” In this context, if a searcher is searching for something on a search engine, that search is a keyword! (That’s a lot of search in one sentence!)

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