Does anyone have any good strategies/tools for KW research for local brick and mortar merchants. I have tried Wordtracker but it seems when you place a city name modifier before or after a keyword the results are fairly useless compared to a non-regional keyword research task.

You could start up an adwords account and set up a small campaign for the phrases you want statistics for.

After a week or so, you can se how many impressions the different searchphrases have. (This is the number of searches)

This will cost you a little but its a more reliable way to se number of searches on Google for specifik searchphrases.

For this to work you have to make sure your daily clickbudget is high enough to keep your ads up there all day and make sure that your max cost per click i high enough to put your ads on the first page. Otherwise the number of impressions won't be the same as the number of searches done.

That sounds reasonable. I'll give it a shot. Thanks for the advice.

Is there a reason wordtracker does not appear to have reasonable data for these types of searches?

Is there a reason wordtracker does not appear to have reasonable data for these types of searches?
sampling errors.

since the search volumes on local queries tends to be low in the grand scheme of things a few extra searches here and a few less searches there makes a big difference.

hi denverseo.I can suggest you a tool, where you can see how many times a keywod/phrase is searched daily( by a country):

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

I use it from time to time and it helps me. :)

all the best.

Does anyone have any good strategies/tools for KW research for local brick and mortar merchants. I have tried Wordtracker but it seems when you place a city name modifier before or after a keyword the results are fairly useless compared to a non-regional keyword research task.

denverseo - I think you simply need to look at the search terms apart from city name modifiers, and then use common sense and intuition.

If you're researching for local merchants, what you're looking for is, in fact, how people describe their goods... not the importance of those goods in one community versus another. So it shouldn't matter that searches for "subway maps" are more common in New York than they are in Denver. That kind of relevance will take care of itself, because you won't find many clients selling subway maps in Denver.

What you're interested in is whether shoppers search more often for, eg, "women's clothes denver" or "women's clothing denver."

What seobook says about sampling errors with Wordtracker is correct. Wordtracker has an extremely small sample base, taken from a small metasearch engine, and it multiplies the results from this small sample to achieve its predictions for all searches or those for a given search engine.

But none of the keyword tools... Google, Overture, or Wordtracker... is likely to be much good at predicting anything but very large city local searches. I think you've just got to target for your core non-regional phrases, and then build all of the likely regional modifiers into your page optimization.

You could start up an adwords account and set up a small campaign for the phrases you want statistics for.

After a week or so, you can se how many impressions the different searchphrases have. (This is the number of searches)

This will cost you a little but its a more reliable way to se number of searches on Google for specifik searchphrases.

For this to work you have to make sure your daily clickbudget is high enough to keep your ads up there all day and make sure that your max cost per click i high enough to put your ads on the first page. Otherwise the number of impressions won't be the same as the number of searches done.

If I set up a campaign will it only show me impressions for the keyphrases I have specified or it will it also show me via broad match what other phrases my add had impressions for?