So today we're going to be looking at doing keyword research for your local SEO listing. If you created a Google business profile and you're trying to rank high on Google Maps, of course, the keywords that you attempt to rank for are very important. In fact, that's where relevance comes in. And relevance is one of the three primary local SEO ranking factors. So in this video, we're just looking at relevance. We're just looking into keyword research. I'm going to show you guys exactly how I do it step by step and the tools that I use both free and paid. So, without any further ado, let's get started. So, if you're a dispensary, the keyword that you want to rank for is pretty straightforward, right? I mean, the main ones are going to be dispensary near me, which according to this tool gets about 7 and 12 million monthly uh searches every single month, as you can see right there. Of course, that's going to be for uh all of the US, right? We're not just talking about your specific area, but dispensary near me is a big one. And then the other one is going to be dispensary and the city name that you're in. So, for this video, let's just do dispensary Los Angeles. Right. By the way, this is the free keyword tool that I would highly recommend. I'll link it, you know, somewhere below. It's on seanking.com.
You just type in the keyword. You select uh the country that you're in. US is selected by default. Click analyze and it's going to do, you know, it'll get you a certain amount of the way there, right? So, if we're searching for dispensary Los Angeles, basically, we're going to see similar keywords and related keywords. So, let's go ahead and view the detailed report of the similar keywords. You do have to sign up for an account to get the whole list here, but even just these ones at the top, we can understand Dispensary Los Angeles is getting 5.4,000 searches every single month, and it has a 28 out of 100 difficulty, which is actually pretty low according to this tool. Then we have dispensaries, Los Angeles, CA. Dispensaries in Los Angeles, CA, you know, dispensaries in Los Angeles, California, dispensary menu, Los Angeles, right? So, you'll start to find keywords that you might not have even thought of. And if the keyword for your uh city, the main keywords are too competitive, such as dispensary Los Angeles, this might be a good opportunity for you to try to rank for something like dispensary menu Los Angeles instead. The other thing you can do is niche down further, right? So, Los Angeles is a big city, right? It's a big county actually with multiple cities in it. So, let's say your uh dispensary is actually in Korea Town. You might want to try ranking for uh dispensary Korea Town instead, right? Or dispensary Culver City or dispensary Westwood, whatever the case might be. Dispensary Los Angeles might be too out of reach.
If the keyword difficulty is too high and there's just too many competitors in that area. Also, if you're too far from the keyword that you're trying to rank for, it's going to be an uphill battle. So, we talked about this with proximity. Proximity matters. If you're all the way in Santa Monica, you know, you're not too far from the city center of LA, but this LA Wonderland dispensary here is always going to have a higher chance of ranking for dispensary Los Angeles than you are if you're all the way in Santa Monica, right? They're just way closer to the city center. So again, if you're in Santa Monica, maybe try ranking for dispensary Santa Monica. And we could come in here and see if it's worth it.
So we'll type in dispensary Santa Monica. and it'll tell us the search volume, right? So, here the search volume is obviously a lot lower. You know, we're only getting 90 searches a month for dispensary Santa Monica. But once you start adding up all the similar ones, right, best dispensary in Santa Monica, dispensaries Santa Monica, dispensaries in Santa Monica, it does start to add up. And as you can see, the difficulty is way, way lower, right? Uh you're at a eight out of 100 versus the dispensary Los Angeles, you're at a 28 out of 100.
So it might even be worth it starting with a smaller keyword and then as your dispensary go grows, as you get more reviews, as you get more interactions with your Google business profile, you can try to rank for uh you know more difficult keywords. The other thing that you can do is niche down in terms of the service you provide. So, if you provide a service that many others might not, so let's say you provide delivery or curbside pickup or some dispensaries even have a drive-thru, you could try to look into those keywords. So, maybe you still want to rank for the city of Los Angeles, but instead of dispensary, you could rank for dispensary delivery Los Angeles or dispensary with delivery, dispensary with pickup Los Angeles.
Right? Those are some of the ways you can kind of niche down into keywords to make the difficulty low enough so that's it's attainable for you starting out with a new Google business profile. But that's pretty much as far as we could get with the free tool. The paid tool that I would recommend is a tool called SEM Rush. It's pretty pricey. It's $1.99 a month. Uh but they do have a 7-day free trial. So if you just sign up for that just to do your keyword research, I would highly recommend it. When you're in SEM Rush, we're going to click on keyword magic tool. And here we'll type in our keyword again. So let's do dispensary Los Angeles.
Click search. And this is of course going to give us a lot more information than the free tool. So here we're going to see all of the keywords that uh you know we can try to rank for uh and the volume behind those keywords and their uh difficulty according to uh their tool. Right? Every tool's a little different. They have their own algorithms um and their own like statistics that they look at. So here it's saying dispensaries Los Angeles, California actually gets more volume than just dispensary Los Angeles. That's something I wouldn't have guessed, you know, without looking at a tool like this. Uh but the difficulty is very high in this case. A 67 out of 100, 64 out of 100, right? Um here we have a 45 out of 100. Best dispensary in Los Angeles. So, we could niche down and try to rank for that keyword specifically. What I would recommend from here is basically pick five to 10 keywords that you want to try to rank for, right? And we can add them to a list in SEM Rush. So, we just click this uh little icon here and um let's go ahead and create a new list. So, we'll, you know, name it Los Angeles or whatever your dispensary's name is and we're just going to uh save it to this list, right? So, these are going to be the hard keywords. Dispensary Los Angeles, right? Los Angeles dispensary dispensaries in Los Angeles. Cookie dispensary Los Angeles doesn't pertain to us. It gets a lot of search volume, but obviously that's for the cookie uh dispensary and cookie brand specifically, so we're not going to add that. Best dispensary in Los Angeles is something we want to try to rank for.
Pot dispensaries Los Angeles. Weed dispensary in Los Angeles. This basically gives us a good idea of where we want to start. Of course, being a dispensary in general, you have a pretty uh straightforward set of keywords. None of this is really surprising, but we could also look at these other categories. Uh phrase match, right? So, these are keyword phrases in various orders. Um and we could see, you know, what these are doing and get ideas for what we want to rank for here. In general, of course, we want to try to rank for the keywords that have the highest volume and the lowest difficulty, right? So, in this case, dispensary Los Angeles, the most straightforward keyword, of course, is going to have a ton of volume, but it's also probably going to be the most competitive. So, if we can find, you know, more niche keywords that still have good volume and lower competition, you know, that would really help out. So here, downtown dispensary Los Angeles.
If you're located specifically in the downtown area, this would be a good keyword, uh, you know, to go after. So it's 110 searches every single month and a 36 out of 100 difficulty. Uh, cheapest dispensary in Los Angeles, California, right? Again, 110 searches a month, 37 out of 100 uh, difficulty. So that's kind of the mindset here. Find the highest volume keywords with the uh lowest difficulty. Those would be the best places to start. And one last thing we could do is the related keyword section. So, we could look at this as well. Again, just keeping all of that in mind. Um, for example, dispensary near Los Angeles, California would be a terrible keyword to try to rank for because it has a low volume and it has pretty high difficulty, right? Um, just so again, just keep that in mind. You can actually sort by volume. So if you want the volume to be at the top, we can do that. You could sort by difficulty.
So if we want the easiest ones to be at the top or the hardest ones to be at the top, we could look at that. One thing that we could do here, for example, we could do lowest difficulty. So I clicked here to rank by lowest difficulty. And we're going to add an advanced filter and uh or sorry, we're going to include keywords. And we want to make sure that the keyword includes Los Angeles, right? because fruit 14 pack pre-roll price doesn't really relate to us especially when we're looking at local search. So we'll go click on apply and we'll see what it tells us. So, uh, 420 deals Los Angeles, 30 volume, zero difficulty, right? CBD gummies Los Angeles dispensary open late in Los Angeles. Um, weed delivery Los Angeles.
Look at this. We have a,000 volume and only a 17 out of 100 difficulty. So, if you do delivery, that keyword is pretty much a gold mine. So that's how you could start to kind of ideulate, pick the keywords that you want to rank for, you know, add them to a list so we can refer to them later. One other thing that you could do is just straight up look at your competitors to see what they're ranking for, right? So if we go and we do a search for dispensary Los Angeles, we can find the dispensaries that are constantly showing up at the top. Me personally, I see this LA Wonderland dispensary all the time. Uh you know when I'm searching for dispensary Los Angeles they're obviously doing something right. What we can do is we can see exactly what keywords they're ranking for and that'll give us some keyword ideas as well. So if we go back into our uh tool here SEM Rush and we click on a different area. We're going to click on domain overview. All we need to do is uh paste their domain in here.
Right. So they're uh go wonderland.com. We're going to paste that in here. We're going to set this to US and click search. Let's go ahead and scroll down. These are the keywords that they rank for. So, let's go ahead and view those details. And it'll literally tell you they rank for 578 keywords. And if you adjust it by traffic, we're filtering, we're sorting, so traffic sorts uh shows up at the top. Wonderland in Los Angeles is the number one keyword that they rank for. Now, that doesn't really help us, does it? Because we're trying to find keywords that we could rank for. So, what we need to do here is we need to filter this down. First, we want to see uh the keywords that either show them uh in the top 10 or the top three of the Google results. So, let's go ahead and click on top three. We want to click on SER features and we want to make sure that it's using um where is it? Here.
It's using the local pack right here. So, we don't care about the uh keywords that they're ranking for that is sending people to their website. We care about the keywords that they're ranking for that is sending people to their Google business profile. Right? That's where we're focused. So, again, top three uh only looking at local search, the Google business profile. And then also what we can do is we can add here under advanced filters. Again, we could make sure that the keyword includes Los Angeles. So, it's not random keywords that, you know, we can't really rank for. And just like that, it basically shows you everything that they're ranking for. So, dispensaries, Los Angeles, California, no surprise, uh they're getting about 200 uh clicks every single month from that keyword. It's about uh almost 3% of their website traffic they're getting from this keyword. A lot of the keywords that we've already seen. Um, pot stores in Los Angeles, cheapest dispensary in Los Angeles, California, marijuana dispensary Los Angeles. These are the keywords that they're ranking for. If we remove the Los Angeles filter, you know, just to see what's going on here, you'll see Wonderland Dispensary. Of course, we can't rank for that, but hey, Los Angeles actually has an abbreviation, right? LA dispensary.
That's something we didn't consider. They're getting a lot of traffic from there. So maybe we want to add that to our list as well. So this is basically how you go through the process, right? You could use the free tool and kind of get an idea, a gist of the keywords that you want to rank for. If the main keywords are too competitive, then you can niche down either with adding a specific service that you offer that other dispensaries might not, you know, such as delivery or or pickup or whatever the case might be. Or you could niche down to the next uh you know nearest city that might have lower competition. And then lastly, you could look at what your actual competitors are ranking for. Get some ideas there. In general, you want to add the keywords to your list that have the lowest uh difficulty and the highest traffic, right? So, that's really what we're looking at here. Once you have those keywords, what you once you know what you want to rank for, then we have to go to the next step and actually optimize your Google business profile, optimize your website to rank for those specific keywords. But that's for another video.
If you have any questions, comments, concerns about this process specifically, feel free to leave them below. And until next time, I'll catch you guys later. Peace.
