Keyword
The words someone uses when they look. A topic for a page, not a phrase to chant.
What does Keyword mean?
The words a person types or speaks when they look for something. On a website, a keyword is a topic you choose to answer clearly on a page, not a spell you repeat.
Also called: search term, keyphrase
Start from the job, not from a tool
You already know the words customers use on the phone. Emergency no-heat, balayage, estate plan, move-out clean. Those phrases are keywords. A research tool can suggest neighbors to them. The tool cannot know which jobs you want more of and which you decline.
Give one primary topic to one page. A homepage that tries to be every phrase will be vague at all of them. Supporting words belong in the sentences naturally. A title tag can carry the main phrase once.
The stuffing reflex
Repeating the same town and service in every heading, every alt field, and every footer line is an old habit. It makes the page worse for the person who called you, which is the person the page is for. Search engines have gotten blunt about pages written for a robot.
If two phrases mean the same service, you usually need one page, not two. If they mean different work, you need two pages with different facts. SEO is that editing choice. It is not a density percentage.
Local phrases
People add near me or a town. You do not have to paste near me into the copy. You do have to say where you work, on the site and on the profile. Local SEO covers the map side. The keyword on the page is still the service.
We choose topics during the audit from the work you described and from what competing local sites bother to explain. We will not hand you a spreadsheet of a thousand phrases and call it the deliverable.
An example
A pool company wanted a page for pool opening, pool closing, and weekly cleaning. Those are three keywords and three different visits. A fourth page targeting best pool guy near me added no fact the others lacked, so they skipped it.
Questions we get asked
How many times should a keyword appear?
Enough that the page is obviously about that topic, and no more. If you are counting, you are done writing and you have started decorating. Read the page aloud instead.
Should I buy a keyword list?
Not for a typical local service site. Spend the effort on the services and the towns you actually cover. A list without pages is a souvenir.
