Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It sounds like you are off to a strong start with a great attitude. Good luck to you!

I think your design looks great!

BTW Optify just released a new study on CTR: http://www.optify.net/guides/organic-click-through-rate-curve

Haha don't worry, we're all guilty of thinking into things too much

No problem!

Cindy, I come up against this challenge frequently.  The solution I've come to rely on for a few years is to swap out the location for the next bigger location closest or enveloping your target location. For example, if I am looking for "Restaurants Sausalito", and if no results come back for that or any of the variations I think are most relevant, I expand it to "Restaurants Marin" (Marin County is where Sausalito is).  Or I'll step it up to "Restaurants San Francisco Bay area", the immediate region. Once I go through that exercise, I'll take the top X phrases that come back and just to be sure, go back and swap in my ultimate intended location. This process serves a couple purposes. 1.  It establishes a base that legitimately works even when there are language nuances across various regions.  For example, I've found that people do in fact search differently from one geo-location to another even here in the U.S. for some things.  And this method targets the words that are used in the immediate location surrounding my target, which is more accurate than non-location based guesses in some situations. 2.  it also helps me target the larger region if it turns out there's search volume for that larger area that I would have missed had I only optimized for the smaller location.  So I do quite often optimize with the larger area in my content. You'd be surprised sometimes at the number of people who search based on those larger areas.  And if nobody seems to be searching for "Restaurants Sausalito" (or very few are), then I get those bonus eyeballs from those searching for "Restaurants Marin" or "Restaurants San Francisco Bay Area" or "Restaurants Bay area". Another method I use includes doing actual searches to see what comes back in the Local Result set when I leave off local identifiers in Google.  I not only look to see what sites are optimized for Google Places, but what sites spend money on PPC specifically targeting that local area.  The more PPC competition in the local results, the higher the potential value for a phrase that doesn't even include the local designator.

Yeah I wouldn't trust Wordtracker as far as I could throw a lead donkey. Not on its own anyway. I've seen it turn up some pretty weird stuff before, long tail phrases that you wouldn't imagine anyone searching, but it seems to think has loads of searches. Embarrassing if you're showing a client something at the time.

I too have this same question so I hope others will weigh in here. Like Wissam, I too have relied on Google's Keyword tool and market Samurai (which in turn relies on Google's Keyword Tool) My concern is that despite what Google says, I fear that numbers don't accurately reflect organic search but are more reflective of Adword results. They say they have changed this but that may be in what terms they return in the tool suggestions, not so much in the numbers themselves. Also, I have read that Bing is making some inroads into Google market share for search. So I feel I should be paying attention to things outside the Google universe. Any suggestions or thoughts on next gen tools for keyword research would be appreciated.

Eric, you are absolutely correct - "and" and "or" are stop words and are ignored by Google. While doing the keyword research you will come across key phrases consisting of stop words because they were searched for. What Spencer has written is absolutely correct but i feel that here we are merging two different things. You can definitely use "exercise and vitamins"

Thanks Aaron.  The client listed about 16 cities that they do business in.  Do you think limiting that list to about 5 cities is a good idea? thanks

You can also check out Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends This will give you data from the past three years or so, but should be viewable in a monthly format.  Insights should also work well (like Aran suggested).

At least part of the answer lies in your competitive landscape.  If you properly optimize just a couple variations as primary phrases, add in other variations as secondary phrases to include within the content, get inbound links spread across both the primary and secondary, you should show up for several if not all of the variations you've listed. Where the competitive landscape factor comes in is this. If you choose options 1 & 2 as your primary, then 3, 4 and 5 as your secondary, and any competitor targets 3 & 4 as their primary and does full on optimization, they'll likely rank higher for those.  But that's only if all other factors are equal. The best way to deal with this and not end up in a vicious cycle, is to leverage PPC ads on the full spread while you focus SEO as I've suggested. If the organic competition is weak, you won't have as much of a battle. Oh - I forgot to mention that I know this because I've worked on U.S. based rental sites - one of the largest regional rental sites, and one of the top two national sites.

I don't know if you saw this. Its very good timing that Rand wrote a blog post about this very subject! Check it out, as always its a worthwhile read. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-citations-5-tactics-to-earn-links-for-your-local-business

Great info!  Thanks.

I agree with you on both fronts.  I never target any specific long tails, but I always build content to rank for long tails.  The way to do this is with quality content with a large word count.  I never write the content with any long tails in mind, but I know that with quality link building I will naturally rank for some long tails. One of my sites gets thousands of visits from hundreds of keywords.  I might get 5-10 visits a month from each phrase.  It would have been silly to plan for any of these keywords.

You could also use Xenu to pull out all your page titles into a spreadsheet, then digg out all the main keywords for each page.  You could then scrape Google Suggest for each keyword to create a much larger list of terms, then chuck all these into some rank tracking software.

Have you obtained local citation type links?  Links that come from other sites and directories with similar or the same geographic location signals on them?  They're vital.  Also, have you obtained a wide variety of links pointing to your internal pages? And how well optimized is your site compared to the others showing up?   Have you created a sweet  spot chart to compare your site to theirs? For example - how many pages does your site have for "renovations" compared to those competitors?  Even though Place page ranking has rules unique to Place pages, these optimization factors are still important.

Glad it helped Mike.  Lots of theories and beliefs about long tail.  What I've found on several client sites is follow these rules to increase the number of long tail phrases you're found for each page: Designate two primary phrases, 2 or three words each Designate two or three highly related secondary phrases, 2, 3 or 4 words each Seed the page Title & h1 with the two primaries Seed the URL with one of the primaries Integrate each of the primaries into the content area descriptive text at least twice each in exact match sequence. Integrate each of the secondaries into the content area descriptive text at least once in exact match sequence. Use partials of those phrases at least once each in the content area descriptive text Of course the more content you write, the more you can seed phrases, but only where it makes sense to readers. Write the content in a high quality way that really sounds human Tightly group pages of content based on phrase relationships When I follow these guidelines, I typically see 30% or more increase in total phrases a site is found for. Of course it's not exact science since there are so many factors in SEO. But doing it this way, where the content really comes across naturally written can result in exponential long tail phrases you didn't intentionally try to focus on figuring out beforehand.