Targeting Local Search Terms

[bjalc2011]

I normally advise clients never to optimise around keywords with very low or even zero recorded Google search volumes. However, if the core keyword has decent volumes but the organisation is serviing specific towns/cities/locations would you consider it valid to optimise for :

core keyword + focused location (even if this has zero search volumes).

The Google Places results are obviously highly relevant but depending on the core keyword you sometimes get the 3-box places at the top but sometimes in the middle of the natural results.

[EGOL]

In the town where I live there is almost zero search volume reported in the Adwords Keyword Tool for "TownName Dentists".... however, there are people typing that query into google (my dentist's site gets visitors for it every month) and the lifetime value of a patient is very high.

Also, there are lots of variants.... "dentists in TownName"....etc.... and combined those variants are more significant in number.

[RyanPurkey]

Short answer, yes. Even more so if your clients are actual brick and mortar businesses that can benefit form walk in traffic.  It's important to remember that Google does a TON of scrubbing of the data it presents to the outside world.  To see this for yourself, take a site you currently run--or where you have access via analytics--and pull some long tail keyword search data from over the course of a year.  Find a few phrases that have brought you 10 or more visits. Plug those in to Google Keyword Tool in a different browser.  Do they have any search volumes?

Dedicating an entire page to an extremely long tail phrase is likely still over kill in a lot of cases, but a quick glance at analytics will give you a solid idea of the search patterns that would help create the content of a great page.

Lastly, part of Google's scrubbing is normalization for a globalized audience.  Only major cities are going to rank in that segment, but would a customer living in a smaller city or neighborhood see a benefit of doing business locally?  Probably.  Always a good idea to make the distance from searcher to sale as short as possible.

[AaronSchinke]

Sometimes common sense should prevail over the KW search volume tool. I've run in to local search terms I KNOW people are searching but aren't being registered.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Google shows keyword volume based on their internal system's evaluation of what phrases are deemed "commercially viable".  It's a severely flawed system, mostly designed to force people to spend more money on perceived higher value keyword phrases in AdWords.

As the other answers show, you are wise to include location relevant words in your optimization.  Both because people are looking for these things, and because having them in the page Titles is VITAL to helping someone doing a search get the reassurance that "this search result IS for what I'm looking for in "THIS AREA".  It's a trust-to-click factor.

If you want proof that people are searching for such things, go to Yelp and see if there are any results on the combination you are considering - and if there are reviews for any of those.

Of course, not ALL phrases are being searched at the local level, yet many are, even if they're not reported in Google's ulterior-motivated system.

Another consideration - here in Marin County, California, many people search for "XYZ + town", yet many more do in fact for "XYZ + bay area" or even "XYZ + San Francisco Bay Area"  or "XYZ East Bay" or "XYZ North Bay"...  so if there is such a regional factor in the local areas you're dealing with, consider doing research on those as well, and adding those into the mix with the more refined local wording.