Does anyone have a best practice for identifying local keyword terms?

[webdecorators]

I utilize a variety of keyword tools when I'm doing research, Google keyword tools, word tracker, keyword spy, etc but as soon as I throw in a city or state, the numbers seem to drop drastically or disappear. I understand that naturally these numbers will decrease because it will be a less popular term, but I feel like I have a great phrase and i don't understand why there isn't ANY local data for it. I was wondering what process you go through to specifically identify local terms.

[AlanBleiweiss]

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.