City/State/KeyWord Combo List Building Tool

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Blogged about this today, but thought I would come over here and share a new tool I just discovered. Did a forum search and have not seen it mentioned here.

Just discovered a great time-saving tool for generating City, State, and/or Zip plus Key Word phrases for localized search optimization. If you have ever tried to do this, you know it can be a tedious job. This is an easy way to develop deeper localized search phrases that includes smaller suburbs.

http://www.5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php

I just barely played with it and only tried the keyword Dentist, for a client of mine. Didn't like the fact the City/State were in all caps, which looked spammy, but maybe that can be easily overcome. Try it and see what you think.

Linda

[graywolf]

Here's my City/State Keyword generator

http://www.wolf-howl.com/local-keywords/

If you can think of any features you would like to see added let me know

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

FYI, mods, I invited graywolf to come over to share his generator, so people would have a couple local search KW generators to review and choose from.
We all need good tools and they are both FREE! :p

I saw it over at ThreadWatch after Nick blogged about my blog entry about local search this morning. ;)

[earlpearl]

The tools are similar and very nice. Real applicability there. I'm sure applications would be very different for different types of services/products.

Took a quick look at our search engine phrases and word usage since 1/1/05.

We are very focused on high ranking for our main phrase and location. We focus ranking on 2 state names and a major city name. We have also spread smaller town names throughout the content so we get visits for our site for our phrase and town name searches...not only state/city names.

Major phrases would be Ohio red widgets, red widgets ohio, kentucky red widgets, cincinnati red widgets.

Specific listings for towns could be Turpin Hills red widgets or red widgets Highland Heights.

In looking at our data though, at least for our service, the town/city (other than the one in which we are located, had less than 5% of the visits to our site than did the lowest of the 2 states/one city. Quite low. For any search phrases with a town name we show #1 for organic searches.

I'm wondering about a different application. If we use either of these tools for more generic or associated phrases w/ the town names it might create an advertising/visibility value. My thinking is I wouldn't bid high for any such phrases because I wouldn't expect many hits but there may be visibility/advertising value.

We tried something like this a while ago. Instead of orienting adwords campaign toward every town in the region we oriented a campaign to an associated service usage that is related to our service and draws overlapping interest. Had negligible impact.

In any case the tools definitely make a time consuming task easier and are more thorough than I would do on my own. I suspect their usage and effectiveness depend on the service/products.

Sure would like to hear about other experiences.
Dave

[wiltonbiz]

Thanks for the keyword generator tools. I have not seen tools like these before. Those are an incredible time saver. I do quite a bit of local SEO and PPC, and I'll be using them.

WiltonBiz

[conciseusa]

Hello All,

I am the creator of
http://www.5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php

Wanted to let you know

"Didn't like the fact the City/State were in all caps, which looked spammy."

has been addressed. I added some code to make the first character of the city names upper case and the rest lower. I assume this is the best. If not, let me know and I can add options to set the case in different formats.

Also, I added an additional check box so you can include the full state name in addition to the 2 letter state code.

If you think of any other features you could use, let me know.

[wiltonbiz]

Maybe someone would like to share instances where they use these very local town level keywords successfully. For example, how would you use them (if at all) when using Google Adwords Regional/Metro? If I am doing Adwords on regional basis, my ad will be seen by most everyone in that region who searches on my keyword, without the town, so where does the town part come into the equation?

Also - I have not used Yahoo/Overture with a geographic element to the key phrase -- have people had success with this route?
WiltonBiz

[conciseusa]

In reply to:
"If I am doing Adwords on regional basis, my ad will be seen by most everyone in that region who searches on my keyword, without the town, so where does the town part come into the equation?"

In my testing this is not the case. Most users will not see your ad. Here is the results of my testing and the reason I spent the time to create a local keyword generator.

My wife owns a Chinese restaurant that delivers so I thought I would set up an AdWords campaign at Google to get leads for her web site that has the delivery menu.

I had no idea it would take almost a week of full time work to get to the bottom of how to set up a local ad campaign on AdWords. I think I finally have things working and I will share the highlights of what I have learned in case someone else wants to give them a try.

After reading the setup info and setting up the campaign, the first thing I found was the Google Target Location feature had issues. Maybe it is just the ISPs I use, but not a single ad would come through until I set the campaign to "Global or nationwide-United States". Google attempts to locate users based on their Internet address. Due to a number of technical issues, Google often can not locate a user and will only show ads from the Google national ad pool, rendering the Google Target Location feature unsuitable for targeting many, if not most, Internet users. After moving my ad to the national ad pool, ads started appearing so I started testing the "broad match" logic. Unfortunately, the broad match logic was not very intelligent. For example, if I set up a keyword in AdWords "Chinese delivery TUSTIN" and then went to Google and searched on "Chinese delivery TUSTIN, CA" or "Chinese delivery TUSTIN CA", no ad would show up. I know the phrase was in AdWords because "Chinese delivery TUSTIN" would trigger an ad to display. Why Google does not trigger on "Chinese delivery TUSTIN CA" when all the words in the AdWords phrase are present in the query is a mystery to me.

At this point I realized I would need to create keyword phrases for every keyword + location I would want to trigger an ad. I entered in to a mild state of depression thinking of the monotonous task of building such a list, and became suicidal at the thought of maintaining this list. Routine tasks like expanding or reducing the radius of the target area and changing the base keywords would be very time consuming. After a bit of thinking I determined it would be justified to spend a few days coding a system that would accept a US zip code, an area radius, and keyword list and then build a list containing all possible combinations of cities/zip codes with the entered keyword list.

I coded the system in PHP/MySQL and I have placed it on a public page for others to use and comment on. The URL to the page is http://5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php. So far things seem to be working well. I set the zip code, a radius of 2 miles, entered 16 keyword phrases I thought people might search on and a few nearby neighborhood names. The resulting combined list contained 240 items. I loaded this list into AdWords and now I am getting ad triggers that I am happy with. If I expanded the area radius to 10 miles, an area many service companies cover, the resulting list contains 2,512 items; a list that would be difficult to maintain manually.

To cover my bases, I setup 2 AdWords campaigns in Google to cover an area. One using a localized keyword list created with my local keyword tool, and a campaign using Google's Target Location feature. Thus far I am getting 4 - 5 times the number of impressions and click troughs on the local keyword list campaigns as I am on the campaigns using Google's Target Location feature. Also the cost per click is much lower on the local keyword list campaigns.

I am sure I still have a lot to learn about how to manage a local AdWords campaign, but at least now I have a tool that makes it easy to test new scenarios. The customers have reported new business since setting up the campaigns so I would call my efforts with local PPC advertising a success.

[wiltonbiz]

ConciseUSA:

There is much that is fascinating, and some stuff confusing, in your post. I have had good results for several clients with regional adwords, but I am generally targetting at least a major metro area (eg New York) if not several states. This certainly results in the ad being shown in the region with reasonable frequency. You refer to "Tustin, CA," which I have not heard of. When using Adwords, unless you are using their newer, geo-targetting via latitude and longitude, you must select a DMA (or designated market area). What DMA did you choose for Tustin? Did you include the keyword "Tustin" in these ads?

I am fascinated by your success with such local keywords on a national campaign. I'm going to try it out myself.

WiltonBiz

[conciseusa]

Sorry for any confusion. Some of this stuff gets complicated and I am not sure how to describe all my findings.

I tried every option I could find in AdWords for local targeting. None work to my satisfaction. In my opinion, the fundamental problem is Google will attempt to locate the user by their IP address. Two problems with this are many ISPs consolidate their traffic and dump it on to the Internet in a Galaxy far, far away. My ISP places me 3,000 miles from my location! The other problem is what if the user is searching for something outside of their current area?

The only solution I have come up with is to localize my keyword lists.

I will look forward to hearing about your experiences as you try different ways of attacking local PPC advertising.

[earlpearl]

Concise:

Love your description. Made me think a bit. I've a local service. It covers the Washington DC region. While my service is highly ranked in all 3 major engines for generic terms...the real money terms are ones with "service...Maryland, Washington DC, DC, Virginia, VA, or MD" The term w/ geography converts at about 5 times better than the generic terms.

Having first page for the generic terms help...and get me traffic before competition for the local terms...but location/term is the key.

Frankly, state/or city terms for the service are dramatically more effective than town names...but I suspect that all depends on the service/product.

Pizza or Chinese food Bethesda (a big town outside of Washington DC) would be far more appropriate and helpful than pizza/chinese food maryland or Washington DC.

Regardless, I've been running adwords for one of the states off a google local program...using a 30 mile radius off a central point in the state.

As you have noted...who knows if I'm picking up traffic from the state or not...based on where IP's are located. I'm going to try the ads nationwide even w/the state name just to see the difference in traffic volume and click throughs.

I really like your system. Depending on the service/product it is very thorough.

Dave

[earlpearl]

One day after eliminating the local geographical parameters for an adworks campaign the total impressions were 6 times the average for the last 25 days.

My geo parameters covered 1/2 or more of the population of the state. Each ad uses exact match. Each ad has either the state name or initials in it.

One day is too short a time frame to check...but now I'm suspiceous of the usefulness of using geo parameters.

Dave

[conciseusa]

Hello Dave,

Did you remove the locations from a localized keyword list, or did you remove the local targeting feature in AdWords?

I run both localized keyword lists and the local targeting feature in AdWords. I am still waiting for a clear trend to appear in the patterns of the 2 campaigns. Things tend to bounce around more than I thought that they would.

Walter

[earlpearl]

I removed the local targeting feature...allowing the ads to appear on a national basis.

All the adword keyword phrases are exact match with the full state name/service or the 2 letter state initial/service.

Our prior geo targeting covered half or more of the state population base. I'll be checking this daily to see the trend.

Dave

[conciseusa]

I have a new client that needed state names combined with keyword phases so I added some new features to my Local Keyword Generator (http://www.5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php):

Include all USA State Names in Locations Check Box
Include all USA State Abbreviations in Locations Check Box
Check box to scrub " [ ] from entered keyword & permutator lists
Fixed a bug that prevented the zip code removal feature from operating

Others might find these new features handy so I giving the heads up.