How to find local keywords for your suburbs: the research a small business can do in an afternoon

Keyword research for a local business is not the thousand-row spreadsheet an agency shows you. It is a short list of the ways people in your suburbs ask for what you do, sorted into the ones that need a page and the ones that need an answer. You can build that list in an afternoon with free tools, and it is how we plan every suburb site we run ourselves in Australian cities. This is the method.

The four shapes of a local search

Every local search is one of four shapes, and each shape wants a different thing from your site.

1. Service + suburb. “Blocked drain Marrickville”, “physio Chatswood”, “electrician Logan”. The searcher knows what they need and where. This shape gets a page: the service page for the job, the suburb page for the area, linked.
2. Service + near me. “Plumber near me”, “dentist near me”. Answered mostly from Google Business Profiles close to the phone. The profile and its categories do this work; the website gives it a page to link to.
3. The cost question. “Hot water system replacement cost”, “how much does a termite inspection cost Brisbane”. Informational, high intent, and the one AI Overviews quote. Answered on the service page, in the first lines, with a number.
4. The what-to-do question. “Burst pipe what to do”, “power out in one room”, “termites in house what to do”. Urgent, often at night. Answered on an emergency or service page, then an article if it deserves more.

Sorting your list into these four tells you most of what to build.

Where to find them, free

Search Console: the searches you already appear for

If your site has existed for a few months, Google Search Console’s performance report lists the real searches it appeared for, with impressions, clicks and average position. Sort by impressions. The searches with impressions but a poor position are the ones a dedicated page would move; the ones with impressions and no clicks have a title problem. This list is worth more than any tool’s estimate, because it is yours.

The Business Profile: what people searched before they found you

The profile’s performance view shows the searches that led to your listing, split into your business name and the discovery searches (the services and suburbs). The discovery searches are your service-plus-suburb list, written by customers.

Autocomplete and “People also ask”

Type your service into Google and pause: “plumber marrick…” shows the suburbs and the jobs people pair with it. Add a suburb and see the questions under “People also ask”; those are your FAQ and your cost and what-to-do shapes. Do this for each main service; it takes ten minutes.

The phone and the inbox

Write down how customers describe the job when they call or text: “the hot water’s gone”, “there’s water coming through the ceiling”, “the safety switch keeps tripping”. People search the way they speak, and these phrases are the headings and questions your pages should use. A tool cannot give you this; your last month of enquiries can.

Competitors’ pages

Open the three businesses ranking above you for your main search and read their page titles and headings. Not to copy, but to see which services and suburbs they have pages for and which they do not. The gap is often your first ten pages.

How to sort the list

Put every search into one of four columns:

• Page. Service + suburb searches for jobs you do and suburbs you serve. One page each, in order of demand, built in phases. The service-area article is how to build the suburb ones.
• Answer. Cost and what-to-do questions. An answer in the first lines of the relevant service page, plus an FAQ entry with FAQPage markup. If the question deserves more, an article.
• Profile. “Near me” and category searches. Handled by a complete Business Profile with the right categories and service areas; nothing to build on the site beyond the page it links to.
• Skip. Searches for jobs you do not do, suburbs you do not serve, people looking for work or courses (“plumber jobs”, “plumbing apprenticeship”), and national informational searches with no local intent. Pages for these bring visitors who cannot become customers.

About search volume

Tools round small numbers down and miss most suburb-level searches, because the data is sampled and the suburbs are small. A tool will tell you “blocked drain Tempe” has ten searches a month or none; the sites we run receive enquiries every month from searches a tool reports as zero. Use volume to order the work (the biggest suburbs and the biggest jobs first), not to decide whether a real suburb you serve deserves a page. Google’s own guidance on SEO is about making pages that answer what people search for; it does not say the search has to be popular.

The output: a one-page map

The finished research is one page: the services down the left, the suburbs across the top, and in each cell whether the page exists, is planned, or is skipped; under the table, the cost and what-to-do questions assigned to a service page or an article. That map is the plan for the next six months, and it is what we agree with a client before any page is written. The local SEO ranking factors article explains why the page per search matters so much; this map is where those pages come from.

If you would rather have the map done for you, the free audit includes it: your top searches by suburb from real data, the pages you are missing, and the order to build them. In writing, within two business days.