Most local SEO campaigns that underperform aren’t failing because of bad execution. They’re failing because nobody did the research to understand the market before building the campaign. A firm launches a set of practice area pages, sets up a Google Business Profile, and starts publishing blog posts, all without ever checking who’s actually ranking in that market, what those competitors are doing well, or what the search landscape even looks like in that specific city. Peak Marketing treats research as the actual starting point of any local campaign, not a formality to rush through before the “real work” begins, because the decisions made in this phase shape everything that follows.
Research for local SEO covers more ground than most firms assume. It’s not just picking keywords. It’s understanding the competitive field, the search behavior specific to that market, the gaps in the firm’s current online presence, and the realistic timeline for closing those gaps. Here’s how to actually do it.
Start by Mapping the Competitive Landscape
Before anything else, search the terms your firm wants to rank for exactly as a prospective client would, from the actual city or area you’re targeting. Look at who shows up in the Local Pack and who shows up organically below it. These are often different sets of competitors, and both matter.
For each competitor showing up consistently, check their Google Business Profile. Note their category selection, how complete their description is, how many reviews they have and how recent those reviews are. Check their website for how deep their content goes, whether they have location-specific pages beyond a generic “areas we serve” list, and whether they’re publishing anything resembling a blog with any regularity.
This isn’t about copying what competitors do. It’s about understanding what the bar actually looks like in your specific market, since that bar varies enormously between a small town with three competing firms and a dense metro with forty.
Analyze the SERP Itself, Not Just the Competitors On It
The search results page tells you things beyond who’s ranking. Notice whether the Local Pack appears at all for a given search, since some more niche legal queries don’t trigger it and instead show straight organic results. Notice whether “People Also Ask” boxes appear and what questions they contain, since these reveal exactly what Google considers related intent for that search.
Pay attention to what kind of content is actually ranking organically. If every top result for a given search is a long, detailed guide answering a specific question, and your firm’s plan was a short generic overview page, that gap tells you something important before you’ve spent any time writing.
Research the Market’s Actual Search Behavior
Search behavior varies by geography more than people expect. A term that performs well in one metro might barely get searched in a smaller nearby market, where people phrase the same need differently or search for a smaller town’s name instead of the larger city they technically live near. Keyword research tools that show search volume broken down by location help here, but so does simply searching from a few different neighborhoods or towns within your service area and watching how the results and suggested searches shift.
This regional variation matters most for firms serving a spread-out area rather than a single dense city. A firm drawing clients from a metro’s core along with several surrounding smaller towns needs to research each of those markets somewhat separately rather than assuming the metro’s search patterns apply everywhere the firm actually gets clients from.
Audit Your Own Current Presence Honestly
Research isn’t only about competitors and the market. It has to include an honest look at where your own firm currently stands. Pull up your Google Business Profile as a stranger would see it and check whether the category, description, hours, and photos actually reflect the firm today. Search your firm’s name alongside your city and see what citations come up, checking for outdated addresses or old phone numbers still floating around on smaller directories.
Review your existing content with the same scrutiny you applied to competitors. Does it answer the specific questions a searcher in your area would have, or does it read as a generic overview that could belong to any firm in any state? This audit often surfaces the biggest and easiest wins, since fixing an incomplete profile or updating stale content usually costs far less effort than building an entirely new campaign from scratch.
Check for Citation Gaps Specifically
Part of this internal audit should include checking which of the core legal and local directories your firm is actually listed on, since gaps here are common and easy to miss. Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Martindale-Hubbell, Bing Places, and the general business directories like Yelp all carry different weight, and a firm that’s thorough on Google Business Profile but has never claimed its Avvo listing is leaving an easy, low-effort citation opportunity unclaimed.
Talk to the People Who Actually Talk to Clients
Some of the most useful research doesn’t come from a tool at all. Intake staff and attorneys hear the same questions and concerns repeatedly from prospective clients, and those patterns reveal exactly what content would resonate and what search terms people are likely using before they ever call. A firm that skips this step and relies entirely on keyword tools misses the specific language real clients use, which often differs meaningfully from the more generic phrasing a tool surfaces first.
This is also where a firm can validate assumptions about what actually drives its cases. A firm might assume most of its personal injury cases come from car accidents, only to have intake reveal that a large share actually stem from a specific type of workplace incident common in the local economy, which should reshape both the content strategy and the keyword targets entirely.
Look at Review Content, Not Just Review Ratings
Reading through competitors’ reviews, and your own firm’s reviews, surfaces research that most firms skip entirely. Reviews often mention specific concerns, specific case types, or specific aspects of the experience clients valued, and this language is genuinely useful for shaping both content and the firm’s own review request messaging. If several reviews for a competitor mention how quickly they returned calls, that’s a signal about what clients in this market actually care about, and a firm that can genuinely deliver on that faster response time has a real point of differentiation worth building content and messaging around.
Pull It Together Into an Actual Plan
Research that stays scattered across notes and browser tabs doesn’t help much. The useful output of this process is a prioritized list: which competitors set the real bar, which keywords and long-tail phrases actually match how this specific market searches, which citation and profile gaps need fixing first, and which content topics address real, recurring client questions rather than guesses about what might rank.
This plan doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to be specific to the actual market rather than a generic local SEO checklist applied without adjustment. A firm in a small town with light competition can move faster and more aggressively than a firm competing in a dense metro against a dozen established players, and the research phase is what reveals which situation a given firm is actually in.
Good local SEO research takes real time before any content gets written or any profile gets touched, and skipping it tends to produce campaigns built on guesswork rather than an accurate read of the actual market. Firms that invest in understanding their competitive landscape, their market’s specific search behavior, and their own gaps before building a strategy consistently get more out of the work that follows.
If your firm hasn’t done this kind of research recently, or has never done it at all before launching past campaigns, Peak Marketing starts every local SEO engagement with exactly this process, and it’s often the difference between a campaign that moves quickly and one that stalls out for reasons nobody can quite pin down.
