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Article · 25 August 2026

Choosing keywords when you are a local business

A keyword with 27,000 searches is worthless to a seven-person company. A four-list method to build tracking that brings quotes rather than distant visitors.

The first mistake when setting up rank tracking is entering the keywords that look impressive. A national term with 27,000 monthly searches is a dead end for a company working within thirty kilometres.

Volume is the wrong compass

National queries are held by marketplaces and large groups. Even if you ranked, most visitors would live four hundred kilometres away. Forty well-targeted searches a month beat twenty-seven thousand irrelevant ones.

A method in four lists

  • Your services, named the way customers name them, not in trade vocabulary.
  • Your services plus your town, then the neighbouring ones your customers actually come from.
  • Urgency and immediate intent: emergency, open on Saturday, free quote.
  • The questions customers ask on the phone: your future articles.

How many keywords

Between twenty and fifty for a local business. Below that you cannot tell noise from a trend. Above it you are paying to watch queries you will never work on.

Two traps follow: checking rankings in your own browser — see why that misleads you — and reading a three-place drop as a problem. See our plans or get in touch.

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