How are Hyperlocal Keywords Changing The Topography of SERPS As We Know It?

Buzzwords are always floating by and terms like “Hyperlocal” rarely stay long enough to have a lasting impact on the marketing strategies. Marketing experts first began hearing this buzzword around 2010, and the hum has only gotten stronger over the years. We are here to examine the reason hyperlocal marketing and hyperlocal search algorithms are solid as a rock almost eight years from their advent.

Is it new or has it been there all along?

Hyperlocal marketing may sound like a new buzzword, but it is the oldest form of marketing there is! Before the days of free media, people largely depended on forms of hyperlocal marketing strategies to survive. Think of posters on lamp poles and flyers from storefronts. The years have conserved the practice of hyper-localization in marketing, and only the means have evolved along with the evolution of technology.

What is the true essence of hyperlocal?

Hyperlocal describes the immediate vicinity and a particular radius that covers homes, blocks, and people, who will serve as the target group. In the simplest terms, hyperlocal can refer to your immediate local community.

For example, pizzeria New York is not at all a local search. It will yield at least a thousand results, but Pizzeria Brooklyn NY is still more localized. However, Pizzeria Weeksville, Crown Heights is a hyperlocal search term that will lead to relevant results that the user is probably looking for. The more you shorten the radius of the search, the more “hyper” local your search terms or keywords become!

The challenge with structuring a hyperlocal marketing strategy:

Most marketers, content developers, and SEOs use keyword suggestion tools that include Ubersuggest, KeywordTool.io and Google AdWords. These rely on the volume of search and do not help with hyperlocal keyword suggestions. There is very little information about how to target extremely low volume keywords. There is no ready-to-use list of primary keywords that content developers can leverage or search volume data to compare that marketers can explore. Hyperlocal marketing is once again stuck in the nascent phase thanks to the mass focus on high-volume keywords for the past decade.

Marketers have to use many techniques to meet the demand of hyperlocal SERPs by customization and manipulation of already existing resources. According to the Rockville SEO Experts, you can try these two approaches to find your own set of hyperlocal keyword sets.

Getting help from Google Autosuggest

Google Autosuggest can show you search trends for small localities and communities. It might not be able to give you the exact metrics, but Autosuggest can always tell you which search terms are more popular from the ordering of the terms. Interestingly, your decision will vary depending on the device you are targeting. Mobile devices will have different results when compared to desktops. That is not just true for Google. It is also true for Yahoo, Bing, Google Maps, and YouTube.

Using related SERP suggestions

Experts can resort to either of the two kinds of keyword research. Lexical is the one that explores the semantic relationships between phrases and words. The other is the SERP suggestions that marketers can directly explore using many keyword research tools. SEMrush, Moz Keyword Explorer, and quite a few other premium tools offer related search term exploration.

In the first case, you will find search results that are similar to each other because the search terms are synonymous or semantic. In the second case, you will see the search results varying slightly from one another in terms of related services and similar products. Now, remove the name of the locality and search for the same keywords. You will find many suggestions (check the LSI) that you can use coupled with the name of the region as hyperlocal keywords.

And Voila! You will end up with a bunch of different keyword suggestions revolving around a central keyword.

As you can clearly see, the process of hyperlocal keyword generation is not yet perfect. A lot of local businesses are still struggling to find their target market through this kind of SEO modifications. Right now, most of them are merely using the metrics of similar keywords and businesses in similar regions. Again, this is far from perfect, but it somehow works.

2018 is going to usher in some very welcome changes in the algorithms, tools, and practices of hyperlocal searches. In fact, experts are already predicting a major Google Algorithm Update by the second quarter of the year that will accommodate the changes brought on by hyperlocal search results.

Author bio:

Amy Stein is a marketing expert working on the evolution of search engine algorithms for hyper-localization of search results along with the Rockville SEO Experts team. Their work has paved the path for many small and medium companies across the states, who wish to capture their local market through online marketing.