Local keyword research: how to find 'service + city' terms

Local keyword research is the practice of mapping the search terms people in a specific region use to find a supplier. The short answer: you combine your services with your service area and with the way customers actually search, so you surface terms like ‘plumber Ghent’ or ‘accountant near me’. Those terms have narrow volumes but strong buying intent. In this article you will read how to build such a list for a B2B or services business, and why the standard volume figures often point you in the wrong direction here.

What are local keywords?

Local keywords are search terms with a geographic component. That component is called a geo modifier: a city, a municipality, a region, or an expression like ‘nearby’ or ‘near me’. These are the terms someone uses when they are not simply looking for information, but for a provider that operates in their area.

You recognise them by two patterns. The first is ‘service + place’: a combination of what you do and where, such as ‘seo agency Antwerp’ or ‘handyman Leuven’. The second is the implicit location: ‘near me’, ‘nearby’ or ‘close to me’. Here the searcher types no city at all, but the search engine fills it in based on their location. Both fall under local SEO and both betray buying intent, because someone who adds a location to their query is usually further along in their decision than someone typing a generic term. If you want the broader framework first, read our explanation of what SEO is.

For a services business that is worth gold. Generic terms like ‘bookkeeping’ attract a broad audience, most of which sits outside your service area. ‘Accountant Hasselt’ attracts a smaller but far more relevant audience: people looking for exactly what you offer, in exactly the region where you work.

Start with three sources, not with a tool

The mistake most companies make is opening a keyword tool straight away and aiming at the highest volume. In local research that backfires, because the tool pushes you towards broad terms and filters out the narrow, purchase-ready ones. So start with three sources of your own.

Your services. Write down every service the way a customer would name it, not the way it is called internally. ‘Tax advice’ is your word; ‘tax return’ is the customer’s. Make a simple list of all your services and their synonyms. This is the foundation you will later combine with locations. A thorough approach to that foundation can be found in our guide to keyword research.

Your service area. List every place where you are active or want to be. Think beyond the big city: outlying districts, surrounding municipalities, a province, a regional label like ‘Waasland’ or ‘Pajottenland’. A company in Ghent also gets searched for from Sint-Amandsberg, Ledeberg or ‘Ghent region’. Each of those places is a potential modifier.

Your customers’ questions. How do people phrase their problem on the phone or in a first email? Those phrasings are a treasure trove of search terms. ‘Who can come and fix this urgently’ translates into search terms with urgency. Sales and support staff hear that language daily; ask them.

Then put your service list and your location list side by side and combine them systematically: every service times every place. That quickly produces a few hundred combinations. Not all of them equally valuable, but it is the raw material you will select from.

Why zero volume does not mean ‘no demand’

Feed those combinations into a keyword tool and you will often see a row of zeros or low figures. The temptation to delete those terms is strong. Do not do it.

Keyword tools estimate volumes based on samples and round low numbers down, often to zero. A term like ‘seo agency Ghent’ may show 30 or even 0 in the tool, while every month a handful of companies types exactly that. That handful is precisely your target audience. For local and long-tail terms the search volume is almost always underestimated, and it is exactly those long-tail keywords that deliver the highest conversion.

The most reliable source for local demand is your own Search Console. There you see the real queries your site already gets impressions for, including terms no tool reports at all. If your site already sits on page two for ‘accountant Mechelen’, you know the demand exists, regardless of what the tool claims. Cross-checking between tool and Search Console is therefore not an extra step, but the core of reliable local research.

From list to priority

Not every combination deserves its own page. Sort your terms by intent and feasibility.

Give priority to terms where service and place come together and where the intent is commercial: ‘service + city’ where you genuinely deliver. Next come the broader regional terms, which you can often bundle onto a single page. You do not target ‘near me’ searches with a separate page, but by getting your local signals in order: a consistent address, your Google Business Profile and local citations.

Also watch the search intent behind the place. ‘Marketing agency Antwerp’ is commercial; ‘marketing course Antwerp’ looks similar but has a completely different purpose. One misinterpreted term costs you a page that never converts.

Beyond that, always take a look at the search results themselves. Type in your priority term and see who is there: are those direct competitors, broad directories or players from outside your region? If the first page is full of national names and a local provider is missing, that is an opening. If a few strong local competitors dominate with in-depth pages, you know you will have to raise your game on substance to compete. That quick glance at the SERP often tells you more about feasibility than any volume figure.

A final consideration is your capacity. A list of fifty cities sounds ambitious, but maintaining fifty thin pages delivers less than five strong ones. Start with the places where you have the most work or where you most want to grow, build pages there that genuinely convince, and only expand once those perform. Local SEO rewards depth, not the number of city names you manage to fit on your site.

Every term deserves a destination

A local keyword list is only worth something once every priority term lands on a page that leads the visitor to an enquiry. Three or four core cities ideally get their own local service page, with content that is genuinely about that region: local context, references from the neighbourhood, how you work on site. A thin page where only the city name has been swapped out is instantly recognised as a fill-in-the-blanks exercise by both Google and the visitor.

That is exactly where local keyword research often goes wrong. It does not work as a standalone exercise, but as part of one whole: the right terms, a page per term, and an internal structure that sends visitors from your knowledge articles to your service pages and your contact page. At Customer Impact we do not treat SEO as a goal in itself, but as the acquisition layer of a single growth engine, aimed at pipeline instead of visitor figures that look good in a report. And because more and more people search via ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity, we make sure you do not just rank, but also get cited when someone asks AI for a provider in your region.

Local keyword research is therefore not a box-ticking list. It is deciding where you want to be found, in your customer’s language, and building on that consistently. Do it well and you will not attract an anonymous crowd, but exactly the companies in your area that are ready to work with you.

Want us to build your local keyword list and turn it into pages that produce enquiries? Get in touch and we will look together at where you can grow fastest in your region.