Local keyword research that a small business can actually win
A plumber in a mid-sized city will not outrank national directories for the word "plumber". What that plumber can win is "water heater leaking from the bottom" or "tankless water heater installation" plus the name of the town. StrideRank starts from your own website, pulls search volume and difficulty for the terms around your services, and throws out the ones that are realistically out of reach. You see the shortlist, keep what fits, drop what does not, and add the phrases your customers use on the phone.
Seeded by your services, not by a generic list
The research begins with what your website says you do and where you do it. Those services become the starting terms, so the ideas that come back are about your work — not about whatever happens to be popular in your category nationally.
Difficulty filter on purpose
Every idea carries a difficulty score and a monthly search volume from our keyword data provider. Terms above the difficulty ceiling are dropped, and terms with almost no searches are dropped too. Rare long-tail phrases that have no difficulty score yet are kept, because those are exactly the questions a local business tends to win.
You approve the list
Nothing gets written until you have looked at the keywords. Remove anything that is off-brand, outside your service area or simply work you do not want more of. Add your own phrases. The approved list is what the topic plan is built from.
One keyword, one article
Each approved keyword is used for exactly one article. Two pages chasing the same phrase compete against each other in Google, so the planner checks the keywords already used or scheduled and never assigns the same one twice.
Common questions
- Where does the search volume come from?
- From a commercial keyword database that reports monthly volume and a difficulty score per term. We show the numbers as they come back rather than rounding them into a promise.
- Can I add keywords myself?
- Yes. Add the phrases you hear from customers; they go into the same list and the same plan as the researched ones.
- Does it know where I work?
- It reads the service area from your website and your settings. Make sure your site names the towns you serve — that is also what customers look for.