You have been told you need keywords. Maybe you read our beginner's guide, maybe someone mentioned it at a networking event, maybe your web designer asked you for a keyword list and you stared at the screen without typing anything. Either way, you know keywords matter. You just do not know where to start.
Good news: the process is not complicated, and you can finish it in an afternoon. By the end of this article, you will have a working list of keywords specific to your business and your city. Not a theoretical list. An actual list you can hand to your web designer, add to your website yourself, or use to update your Google Business Profile (the free listing that shows your business on Google Maps).
We are going to walk through this using a real example: an HVAC company in San Antonio. Every step applies to any local business. Swap in your industry and your city and the process works the same way.
Step 1: Write Down Everything You Offer
Before you touch Google or any tool, grab a piece of paper or open a blank document. Write down every service you provide, every product you sell, and every problem you solve.
For our San Antonio HVAC company, that list might look like this: AC repair, AC installation, heating repair, furnace installation, duct cleaning, air quality testing, thermostat installation, mini-split installation, emergency HVAC service, commercial HVAC, preventative maintenance, seasonal tune-ups.
Do not edit yourself. Do not worry about what sounds "searchable." Write down everything you do, even the stuff you do not advertise much. Some of those quieter services might turn out to be the easiest keywords to rank for because nobody else is targeting them.
Once your list is done, go through each item and write it the way a customer would describe it. This is the step most people skip, and it is the most important one. You call it "HVAC preventative maintenance." Your customer searches "AC tune-up San Antonio." You call it "ductless mini-split installation." Your customer searches "mini split AC San Antonio." The language gap between how you describe your business and how customers search for it is where most local businesses lose visibility on Google.
Step 2: Add Your Location to Every Phrase
Take each phrase from step one and attach your city name. Then do it again with your neighborhoods, surrounding cities, and service area names.
"AC repair" becomes "AC repair San Antonio." But it also becomes "AC repair Alamo Heights," "AC repair Stone Oak," "AC repair New Braunfels," and "AC repair Boerne" if you serve those areas. Each variation is a separate keyword that a real person might search.
This is how local keyword research works at its most basic level. National keywords like "AC repair" are impossibly competitive. Millions of HVAC companies are trying to rank for that phrase. But "AC repair Stone Oak" has far fewer competitors, and the person searching it lives in a specific neighborhood where you actually work. That is a more valuable search for your business than a thousand people in cities you do not serve.
Write each combination on your list. You will end up with a lot of phrases. That is fine. The next steps will help you sort the useful ones from the rest.
Step 3: Check What Google Already Shows
Open Google in an incognito or private browser window (this prevents your past browsing from influencing the results). Type in each of your phrases one at a time and look at what comes up.
You are checking three things.
First, look at Google's autocomplete suggestions. Start typing "AC repair San" and watch what Google suggests before you finish typing. Those suggestions are based on what people actually search. If Google suggests "AC repair San Antonio cost" or "AC repair San Antonio same day," those are real searches from real people. Add them to your list.
Second, look at the search results themselves. Are the first page results dominated by big national directories like Yelp, Angi, and HomeAdvisor? Or do you see local HVAC companies with their own websites? If you see local businesses ranking, that keyword is realistic for you. If every result is a major platform or a company with 2,000 reviews, that keyword will be much harder to crack.
Third, scroll down and look for the "People also ask" section. Google shows you related questions that searchers commonly ask. "How much does AC repair cost in San Antonio?" "What is the average cost of a new AC unit in Texas?" These are free keyword ideas from Google itself, and each one could become a blog post or a FAQ section on your website.
Do this for your top 15 to 20 phrases. It takes time, but you are gathering real market intelligence for free. (Most SEO tools charge $30 to $140 a month for a more polished version of exactly this process.)
Step 4: Check Whether People Actually Search Those Phrases
Your brainstorming might be brilliant. Or you might be targeting phrases that sound right but nobody actually types. This step separates the winners from the guesses.
You need a keyword tool that shows search volume, which is just the number of times people search for a specific phrase each month. There are a few ways to get this data.
Google Keyword Planner is free. You need a Google Ads account to access it (you do not need to run ads). It shows search volume ranges rather than exact numbers unless you are spending on ads, but the ranges are enough to tell you whether a phrase gets 10 searches a month or 1,000. That distinction matters.
Ubersuggest shows estimated search volume at the national level. At $29 per month or roughly $290 for a lifetime plan, it is more accessible than the bigger tools. The limitation: it does not break data down by city. "AC repair" nationally is different from "AC repair San Antonio." For local businesses, national numbers can be misleading.
LKR is what we built for exactly this step. You enter your business type and city, and get back search volume data for local keywords with instructions on where to place each one on your website. It costs $12 for 10 searches, no monthly subscription, and credits never expire. Full disclosure: this is our tool. But the reason it exists is that this step, finding local search volume, is the exact point where most business owners get stuck or overpay.
Whatever tool you use, the goal is the same: find out which phrases from your list have real search volume. Some will surprise you. "AC tune-up San Antonio" might get more searches than "HVAC preventative maintenance San Antonio" even though they describe the same service. That is the value of checking. Customer language is not always business language.
Step 5: Pick Your Priority Keywords
You do not need 200 keywords. You need 5 to 10 strong ones to start.
Sort your list by search volume. Then cross-reference with what you learned in step three about competition. The ideal keyword has decent search volume AND search results that include local businesses rather than only national platforms.
For our San Antonio HVAC company, a realistic priority list might look like: "AC repair San Antonio" (high volume, competitive but essential), "heater repair San Antonio" (seasonal, less competition in warmer months), "AC tune-up San Antonio" (specific service, moderate volume), "mini split installation San Antonio" (niche service, low competition), and "emergency AC repair San Antonio" (high-intent, people searching this need help right now).
That is five keywords. Enough to optimize your homepage, two or three service pages, and your Google Business Profile. You can always add more later, but starting with five solid keywords beats starting with 50 vague ones.
Once you have your list, the next question is where each keyword goes on your website. Your most important keyword belongs in your homepage title (the text that shows up in Google search results and in the browser tab). Each service keyword belongs on its own service page. Location keywords belong on a service area page or woven into your existing pages. If you want placement instructions specific to your keywords, our keyword research tool generates those automatically alongside the keyword list.
The Worksheet
Here is the simple format. Open a spreadsheet or grab a piece of paper and create six columns: Service, Customer Language Version, Location Added, Search Volume, Competition, and Priority.
Then fill in one row per service. For our HVAC example, the first few rows would look like this: "AC repair" becomes "AC repair" in customer language (same phrase, lucky you), becomes "AC repair San Antonio" with the location added, then you check search volume with a tool and competition by looking at the Google results. "Preventative maintenance" becomes "AC tune-up" in customer language, becomes "AC tune-up San Antonio." "Mini-split installation" becomes "mini split AC," becomes "mini split installation San Antonio."
The "customer language version" column is where most of the value lives. If you only do one thing from this article, do that column.
You can do every step above with free tools and an afternoon of focused work. The result is a keyword list built on real data, not guesses.
If you would rather skip the manual steps, LKR does this in under two minutes. Enter your business type and city, and get a prioritized keyword list with placement instructions for each keyword. First search is free, no credit card required.
Either way, the important thing is that you stop guessing. Your customers are searching for you right now. The only question is whether your website uses the same words they do.
