Locking In on Keywords - Localizing your Keywords
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If your web site offers products and/or services locally, you can take advantage of that fact, and optimize accordingly.
For the following examples, let's use a made-up web site for a store called Eddie's Mountain Bikes. Eddie's sells mountain bikes in Dallas, Texas. When choosing a keyword search term for this site, the first keyword that probably comes to your mind is "Mountain Bike," and although that word should be plentiful in your web site, we shouldn't stop there.
Let's say, for example, we did stop there, targeting "Mountain Bike" as our main keyword search term for this site. For starters, what does our competition look like? At the time of this writing, the keyword "Mountain Bike" returns over 2,000,000 results -- quite a lot of competition.
Secondly, let's say that we do end up getting in the top 10 results for "Mountain Bike" in Google. What are the chances that the people who are looking to buy a Mountain Bike are going to be in the Dallas area? At the time of this article, there are around 300 million people in the United States and just over 3 million in Dallas.
So in theory, you've got a 1 in 100 probability that the person who just found your site is in the Dallas area. What if instead of being so broad, and only using "Mountain Bike," we became more specific? Let's use the keyword search term, "Mountain Bike Dallas." This takes us from 2,000,000 to just over 50,000 results. Also, anyone searching for "Mountain Bike Dallas" is most likely in the Dallas area. In fact, you could also include surrounding areas to Dallas in your keyword search terms.
Take note that you haven't taken yourself out of the running for the keyword search term, "Mountain Bike," because that is still part of "Mountain Bike Dallas." As such, you can be ranked high in both search terms. Had you only targeted "Mountain Bike," with no trace of Dallas anywhere, you wouldn't be a contender for the Dallas market any longer.
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