How to Find the Keywords Your Local Customers Search For

A plain-English guide for small business owners: find the words local customers type into Google, pick the ones worth using, and put them on your site.

Eric Plotts/October 18, 2026

Local keyword research means finding the exact words and phrases people in your area type into Google when they need what you sell. You combine your service with a place, such as “roof repair Novi” or “dentist near me,” check that real people search for it, and then use those words on your website and Google Business Profile. You do not need paid software to start. A notepad, Google’s search box and an afternoon are enough.

This guide is written for owners who have never hired an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company and never run an ad. We skip the jargon, and every technical term is explained the first time it appears.

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TL;DR

A “keyword” is just a phrase a customer types into Google. Local keywords add a place, like a city, a neighborhood, or “near me.”
Start with a list of your services and your service area, then use Google’s own suggestions to see what people really type.
Pick phrases that signal someone is ready to buy or call, not the ones with the biggest search numbers.
Google decides local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and you cannot pay for a better spot. A complete Business Profile and a clear website are your levers.
Put one main phrase on each page of your site. If that sounds like a lot of work, we can do it for you at a fixed price.

What local keywords are, in plain words

Imagine a customer with a leaking water heater. They pick up their phone and type “water heater repair Farmington Hills.” Those words are a keyword. Your job is to make sure your website and your Google listing clearly say you fix water heaters in Farmington Hills.

According to Search Engine Land’s guide, local keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases local customers use to search for your services in your area. It differs from general SEO because the terms combine your service with a location modifier, such as a city name, a neighborhood, or an implied local cue like “near me.”

There are three common shapes:

Type	Example	Why it matters
Service plus city	“furnace repair Royal Oak”	The customer named the place. Easy to match on your pages.
Service plus neighborhood or landmark	“hair salon near Twelve Oaks Mall”	Very specific, often from people close to you.
Service plus “near me”	“auto glass near me”	The customer did not name a place. Google uses their phone’s location.

The third type surprises many owners. Nobody typed your city, yet Google still shows local results. That is why your Business Profile, covered below, matters as much as your website.

Why it matters more for a small business than a big one

A national company wants every searcher. You want the ones within a 20 or 30 minute drive. That focus is your advantage, because a short list of precise phrases can do more for you than a long list of general ones.

People also look for local businesses on their phones and often act fast. One 2026 statistics roundup reports that 73% of local searches start on a mobile phone and that 23% of American consumers now prefer AI tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini for finding local businesses. Treat these as industry survey figures, not guarantees about your own customers. The takeaway is simple: clear, plain wording about what you do and where you do it helps both Google and the AI tools that read your pages.

Step 1: Write down what you sell and where you work

Open a blank document and make two lists.

List one: your services, in customer words. Not what the trade calls it, but what a customer would say. A dentist might list “teeth whitening,” “emergency dentist,” “Invisalign,” “kids dentist.” A plumber might list “clogged drain,” “sump pump installation,” “water heater replacement.”

List two: your places. Include your city, the nearby cities you serve, your county and a few well-known neighborhoods. If you are in Oakland County, that might be Novi, Walled Lake, Wixom, Commerce Township and Farmington Hills. Only list places you are truly willing to serve.

Now multiply them. Five services and six places gives you 30 combinations. You will not need all of them, but the list is your raw material.

Five services paired with six locations make 30 combinations

Step 2: See what people really type

You can learn a lot without any paid tool.

Use Google’s suggestion box

Go to Google and type the start of a phrase, such as “emergency plumber,” without pressing enter. The suggestions that drop down come from real searches. Try it with each of your cities added. Search Engine Land recommends using this autocomplete feature to spot popular, real-world queries in your area.

Write down anything that matches what you sell. Try adding a letter after your phrase (“plumber novi a,” “plumber novi b”) to see more.

Check “People also ask” and the bottom of the results page

Search your main phrase and scroll. The “People also ask” box and the “Related searches” list at the bottom show how customers word their questions. These are ideas for page headings and for a frequently asked questions section on your site.

Look at who else shows up

Search your main phrase while logged out of your accounts, or in a private window. Look at the map results and the first page. Which words do the businesses use in their titles and headings? You are not copying anyone. You are learning what Google considers a match for that phrase.

Ask your customers

This is the cheapest research there is. Ask the next five customers, “What did you type when you found us?” Check your inbox and call notes for phrases people used. Real customer words often beat anything a tool suggests.

Use a free keyword tool, carefully

Free tools can show roughly how many times a month a phrase is searched. Treat those numbers as rough guides. For small towns, tools often show little or no data. Search Engine Land’s advice for that case is to search your core service without the location to see broader demand, then apply your specific city or service area in your website content.

Step 3: Choose the phrases worth using

Here is where most owners go wrong: they chase the phrase with the biggest number. Bigger numbers mean more competition and often more casual browsers.

The team at Ahrefs, a well-known SEO software company, makes a point in its keyword research guidance: a keyword is only worth something if it can bring in a potential customer. Prefer phrases that show someone is ready to act.

Compare these two searches:

“how does a furnace work” tells you someone is curious.
“furnace repair Wixom” tells you someone has a cold house tonight.

The second phrase may be searched far less often, but it is worth far more to you. Score each phrase on your list with four quick questions:

Would a person typing this want to hire or buy? Words like repair, install, quote, cost, emergency, hire and “near me” are good signs.
Do I actually offer this? Do not chase phrases for services you do not provide.
Is it inside my service area? A customer 90 minutes away is rarely a good fit.
Can I describe it honestly on a page? If you cannot write something useful about it, skip it.

Keep your top 10 to 20 phrases. That is plenty.

Step 4: Match each phrase to one page

The goal is one clear page per main phrase. A roofer should not cram “roof repair,” “gutter installation,” “siding” and five cities into one page. Give each service its own page, and if you serve several cities in a meaningful way, give each city its own page with genuine local details.

For each page, place the main phrase naturally in these spots:

The page title (the line that shows in Google results)
The main heading at the top of the page
The first paragraph
A few subheadings
The short description that appears under the title in results
The text describing your photos

Write for a person first. If a sentence sounds odd read aloud, rewrite it. Repeating the same phrase over and over does not help and reads badly.

Our on page SEO checklist walks through these spots, plus page speed checks, in more detail.

Step 5: Use the same words on your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that appears in Google Maps and in the box of local results. For many local searches it matters as much as your website.

Google states plainly that local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your listing matches the search. Distance is how far you are from the searcher. Prominence is how well known you are, which Google measures in part by links, directory listings and reviews. Google also says you cannot pay for a better local ranking.

That gives you a short to-do list:

Claim your profile and fill in every field.
Choose the main category that best describes your business, then add other categories that truly apply.
List your services using the same customer words from your research.
Write a description that says what you do and where you do it, without stuffing in extra phrases.
Add real photos of your work, your team and your location.

Photos are an underused part of a profile. If you want to see how one trade approaches them, there is a useful guide to Business Profile photos written for wedding officiants. The details differ by trade, but the idea of showing real, current images carries over to any local business.

The same 2026 statistics briefing reports that only 35% of US small businesses have adopted Google Business Profile. If that holds in your town, a finished profile can set you apart from competitors who have not bothered.

Step 6: Keep your business details identical everywhere

Google compares your business name, address and phone number across your website, your profile and online directories. When they match, it has more confidence in your listing. When one directory shows an old phone number or “Street” in one place and “St.” in another, you create doubt. Our guide to local citations and consistent business details explains how to clean this up.

Reviews play a part too. The statistics briefing notes that reviews still matter but are not the only factor: your website and directory listings add to how prominent you look. We cover three simple ways to ask for reviews in our Google reviews guide.

A worked example: a Novi landscaper

This example is made up to show the process. It is not a client story.

A landscaper in Novi lists services: lawn mowing, spring cleanup, patio installation, snow removal. Places: Novi, Northville, Wixom, Walled Lake, South Lyon.

Typing “snow removal” into Google shows suggestions such as “snow removal near me” and others that include town names. The landscaper notes them. A look at the first page shows that most competitors have one catch-all “Services” page.

Her plan:

One page each for lawn care, patio installation and snow removal.
A short section on each page naming the towns she serves and a real detail, like which subdivisions she works in most.
Profile categories and service list on Google updated with the same wording.
Skipping “landscape design software” and similar curiosity searches, because those searchers are not buying a patio.

Nothing here promises a first-place ranking. It simply makes it easy for Google and for customers to see what she does and where.

Common mistakes to avoid

Stuffing in city names. Repeating “Novi plumber, plumber Novi, Novi plumbing” in every line makes your site hard to read and does not help.

Creating dozens of thin city pages. Pages that are identical except for the city name give visitors nothing. Write a page for a place only if you can say something true about your work there.

Ignoring phones. Most local searches happen on a phone, so check that your site loads quickly and your phone number is tap-to-call.

Targeting phrases for work you do not want. If you do not do small jobs, do not rank for them.

Doing it once and forgetting. Seasons change what people search. Review your list once or twice a year.

Our perspective: start with a clear website, not a clever trick

We are a small, owner-operated shop in Novi, and we have been building websites and handling SEO for Michigan businesses since 2011. What we see again and again is that owners expect keyword research to be a puzzle only experts can solve. Mostly it is not. It is writing down, in your customers’ words, what you do and where you do it, and then saying so clearly on your site and your Google profile.

Where owners do get stuck is the follow-through. The list sits in a notebook while the website still has three vague pages and a phone number that is wrong on two directories. So when we build a site, we plan the pages around the phrases customers use, and we set up the basics for search from the start rather than adding them later.

We also think you should know what you are paying for before you start. That is why our website prices are fixed and we do not ask you to sign a long contract. We describe what we do. We do not promise a ranking or a number of visitors, because nobody outside Google can honestly promise that.

— Eric

When it makes sense to hand this off

Doing the research yourself is a good idea if you have an hour or two a week and a website you can edit. Bring in help when:

Your website is more than a few years old and slow on a phone.
You have no idea who manages your Google Business Profile or its login.
You serve several cities and need separate pages without copying text.
You would rather spend your evenings on the business than on settings and headings.

Here is what we offer. A three-page website is $899 and an eight-page website is $1,999, and anything larger gets a fixed quote. A typical build takes about two weeks, with no contract. If you already have a site, our local SEO and Google Maps service covers your profile, your listings and your location pages, and our web design page explains how a new site or a redesign works. If you are redesigning, read our plan for protecting your search presence during a redesign first. You can reach us at (248) 800-1855.

FAQ

What is local keyword research?

It is finding the words and phrases people in your area type into Google when they look for what you sell. Those phrases usually combine a service with a place, like “dentist Royal Oak,” or with “near me.” You then use them on your website and your Google Business Profile.

Do I need to pay for a keyword tool?

No. Google’s suggestion box, the “People also ask” box, your own customers and a look at the first page of results will give you a solid list. Paid tools can add rough search numbers, but for small towns those numbers are often thin or missing, so your own judgment matters more.

How many keywords should a small business target?

Start with 10 to 20 phrases, each tied to a specific page or profile field. A short, honest list of services and places you really cover works better than a long list you cannot support with real content.

Can I pay Google for a better local ranking?

No. Google says you cannot pay for a better local ranking. Paid ads are a separate thing and show in their own labeled spots. Your best organic steps are a complete Business Profile, accurate details everywhere, and a clear website.

Does the keyword need to be my exact city name?

Usually it helps to name your city, but not always. Many people search “near me” and let their phone supply the place. That is why your profile details and your service area wording matter alongside your site text.