One of the first things you do when you decide on creating a website for your business, is to find the right keywords. You have to prospect the market, to see what your competitors are doing and what are the most important keywords researched by users. Still, even with this luggage of knowledge, there is one more thing to do, to chose between

Keyword ( Implicit Keyword ) or Keyword+Location ( Explicit Keyword )

ex:

“Law Office” or “Law Office Miami”

Why is the keyword type so important?

Before deciding, you should know some things about implicit and explicit keywords.

According to Google Trends, there is a huge difference between the number of searches, generated by local users, for implicit keywords than for those that are explicit.

 

In this case, the implicit keyword was searched over 6 times more than the explicit one.

There are some voices saying that instant search might be the reason of this, which seems to have sense, but on a deeper analysis you will see that instant search is displaying results not for the shortest word all the time, but for the one Google consider to be the most relevant – so the premise is wrong.

Google Trends data can be verified on Keyword Planner Tool which since few months ago displays the monthly number of searches per city.

There are other keyword variations as “Miami pizza delivery”  (  on 30 monthly searches ) – but even in this case the keyword alone is the one that really maters.

The result is clear, “Keyword” only – the implicit keywords – are the ones generating most of the traffic.

Influence on Local SEO analysis

In order to target keywords providing the highest number of searches, in the chart above the blue line, we need to analyze website ranking on the implicit keyword search results.

When running Local SEO analysis, for implicit keywords, we shall start from the top ranking websites in each different location in order to understand their SEO strategy.

The results of the analysis depends on the accuracy of the data we are starting from, in our case, the accuracy of the local rankings.

The problem is that Google is automatically delivering results based on the user IP address and this will make it very difficult to know which are the local Google Rankings from Miami for “law office” ( for example ) as long as the analysis is done from an IP from New York. Even if we’ll use Google Custom Location, the results will not be the same as the ones received by a local user.

To have a clear image about top ranking websites we need to run Google Search Queries for implicit keywords by using Local IP addresses and this can be solve either by renting IPs/Remote Servers or by asking someone from the targeted location to run a depersonalized search query on Google.

An easy approach to run this analysis is to use GeoRanker Local SEO reporting tools which runs the search queries via rented Local IP addresses in real time.