The entire point of local keyword research is to speak to customers. Rankings, traffic, and high positions in the SERPs are all great, but none of those pay the bills; customers do.
And where better to look for how your customers talk about your services or your niche than from their reviews of your business or businesses like yours?
Hereâs an important principle for local keyword research: As a business owner or marketer, you are not your target audience. We might have ideas about what matters to our customers or how they talk about the services they need, but those are just educated guesses.
Reviews of real businessesâour own or our competitorsâdisplay what paying customers care about most in their own words.
Why UGC & reviews matter for keyword research
User-generated content (UGC), especially reviews, offers an authentic glimpse into how real people describe their needs, concerns, and experiences with your business or competitors.
When customers leave reviews, theyâre not just rating your servicesâthey’re providing you with a goldmine of insights into their language, pain points, and priorities. This kind of content is raw, unfiltered, and directly reflects what your target audience cares about most.
So, how do you use reviews to inform your local keyword and content research?
Mine Google Business Profile reviews for incisive data
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) and those of your competitors are excellent starting points for customer feedback. You can mine useful data from any platform you have reviews, but realistically, for most local businesses, GBP is the center of customer interaction.
To get a comprehensive view of the market and uncover every possible keyword opportunity, you should look at reviews from true competitors (businesses directly competing with you in the same area) and indirect competitors (businesses in the same vertical but operating in different locations).
If the review count youâre working with is manageable, you might just consider reading through the reviews to identify patterns and whatâs most important to those customers who have taken the time to leave a reviewâpositive or negative.
- What services or products do they mention?
- What seemed to matter most to them in their experience with your business?
- What can you take away from the reviews to inform your content?
Getting to the root of your reviews
Letâs drill down into an example with a lot of reviews to explore the process in more detail.
Roto-Rooter is one of the first businesses to show up when we search for plumber in the Boston metro.
Not surprising considering theyâre centrally located and have a keyword-rich business name. They also have nearly 2,800 reviews (someone is asking for reviews!), the vast majority of which are positive.
Thatâs a lot of content to mine straight from users’ mouths. Whether we are Roto-Rooter or a local competitor, these reviews offer us a window of incredible insight into what our customers or potential customers care about most.
When diving into the review profile, one of the first things we notice is the aggregated keywords at the top of the reviews.
Weâre already getting somewhere! Those keywords alone give us a lot to work with already. And, of course, weâre not limited to this list. If weâre coming to the reviews with ideas or priorities, we can easily search them via the magnifying glass icon.
Comb through the reviews that mention any keyword youâre interested in researching and note what these paying customers mention.
Use AI to speed up your process
RicketyRoo Pro Tip: Download your reviews, upload them to ChatGPT, and prompt AI to give you insights into how to leverage your review content.
If you use reputation management software, you can export your reviews there. If not, you can download your GBP reviews via takeout.google.com or just copy and paste them into a doc or directly into an AI chat. (If you copy and paste, you can grab all the content instead of just the review content; AI will be able to parse through it.) Once youâve given your review data to your AI of choice, hereâs an example of a prompt you might use to mine the reviews for valuable insights:
Analyze this spreadsheet of customer reviews to identify common themes and top customer priorities. Highlight frequently mentioned keywords or phrases, recurring feedback on service or product quality, pain points, and areas of high satisfaction. Summarize findings in a way that can help improve website content, SEO, and customer experience.
How do we actually make the best use of review data?
Okay, so itâs all well and good to identify all this customer feedback and review the reviews. But what can we actually do with it?
It depends. đ
Customer feedback is a powerful tool businesses can use in countless ways. So in a sense, you can use your and competitorsâ reviews to your heartâs delight to improve your operations. But since weâre talking about local SEO, weâll stick to keywords, content, and conversions rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of biz ops.
For keyword research and local SEO purposes, we can distill using review data into three options:
- Create fresh content on what we discover in reviews
- Update existing content to reflect review content
- Enrich our operations with review content
Letâs use each of these with the Roto-Rooter example.
1. Create fresh content from review data.
We noticed that the term septic appears in the aggregated review keywords. A mention in 30 reviews isnât a high frequency, but itâs notable because Boston is generally a high-density metro, with most homes and buildings connected to public sewer lines.
Were we Roto-Rooter or a nearby plumber spying on their review profile (đ€«), we may not have thought to include septic services among our website content. In fact, if we would conduct some explicit local keyword research with a third-party tool, we likely wouldnât target septic services.
Still, itâs clear from reviews that customers in the outer-ring suburbs and exurbs are in need of and looking for septic services. If septic services are within our skillset and the customers within our service territory, we would do well to create a page on septic services that targets the metro. We may want to refine this finding with some more targeted keyword research, but we can thank the review profile for sparking the idea.
Take a look at your Business Profile and competitorsâ, both nearby and far, and you may uncover some hidden keyword gems in this unlikely place.
2. Update existing content with review data.
Continuing with our plumbing example, we notice the terms sunday and window among the prevalent mentions in reviews.
If we click on sunday, we find a lot of folks satisfied that Roto-Rooter was able to address their issue on a Sunday. Clicking on window, we note that this plumber isnât offering window services but that customers really appreciate when the company arrives within the scheduled time window.
Armed with this information, should we create a page on the topics of plumber open on Sundays in Boston and plumber who arrives in the scheduled window in Boston? No, we probably shouldnât. However, we can make great use of this keyword data among existing content.
If we have an emergency plumbing or 24/7 plumbing services page, we should consider highlighting Sunday availability. That update isnât necessarily going to improve rankings directly, but it certainly could aid conversions as potential customers come to our site and receive assurance that weâre availableâeven when the Patriots are playing.
3. Enrich our operations on review data.
We said we wouldnât get into business operations and yet here we are. The thing is: good business makes for better local SEO, so weâll say a little bit.
The term informative appears frequently in the review profile weâre assessing. Interesting. đ€
As we peruse reviews, we notice a trend: customers really appreciate when dispatchers and techs take the time to explain options, protocols, and costs.
This trend among reviews doesnât lend itself to creating new content. We might want to address how our company takes time to inform clients of their options in our existing content, but for potential customers, thatâs more of a âbelieve it when they see itâ statement.
The best thing we can do is encourage our staff to continue to take the time to inform customers of their options. If we are in management or the business owner, weâll want to provide our personnel the bandwidth to offer customers a pleasant experience. If we prioritize zipping through service calls, customer service may suffer. But with customer feedback on informativeness influencing our operations, we know to strike a balance between service-call volume and satisfactory customer service.
We can repeat this process over and over again with the priorities and praises our customers offer us and our competitors. We learn from what matters most to our target audience and capitalize on their insights freely offered via reviews.
Unlock local keyword insights with customer reviews
More than mere testimonials, customer reviews are a treasure trove of insights for your business and your local SEO strategy. By mining your own reviews, competitor reviews, and indirect competitor reviews, you can reveal the exact language and concerns that resonate with your target audience.
Informing your keyword research and content strategy with customer feedback moves your marketing efforts beyond the generic and into the authentic language and priorities of real, paying customers. Reviews are a direct line to what matters most to your (potential) customers.
Local SEO isnât just about being visible; itâs about being relevant and relatableâespecially when your target audience needs you. All the visibility in the world reaps nothing if you arenât relatable. By incorporating customer-centric keywords and feedback from reviews in your content, you increase your relevance and your chances of converting when it counts.
Start mining reviews for keywords and feedback today, and let the customers themselves guide you to local SEO success.
Do you need some help with local SEO? Schedule a discovery call with RicketyRoo, and weâll help send your strategy to the stratosphere.
