Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
According to Wikipedia, there are over 88 cities in Los Angeles. The 15 most populous are:
- 1. Los Angeles – 3,792,621
- 2. Long Beach – 462,257
- 3. Glendale – 191,719
- 4. Santa Clarita – 176,320
- 5. Lancaster – 156,633
- 6. Palmdale – 152,750
- 7. Pomona – 149,058
- 8. Torrance – 145,438
- 9. Pasadena – 137,122
- 10. El Monte – 113,475
- 11. Downey – 111,772
- 12. Inglewood – 109,673
- 13. West Covina – 106,098
- 14. Norwalk – 105,549
- 15. Burbank – 103,340
The next step is to run the same keyword checks for these cities.
As a guideline, target keywords with over 100 searches per month. From the above cities, Long Beach, Glendale, Lancaster, Burbank, and Torrance can be targeted.
Building Sites
Once you’ve picked a niche and identified cities, you can build websites for pay-per-call models in two ways:
- Build sites across random cities in the US, targeting low-competition keywords for quick wins.
- Build a main county site and individual city sites to leverage and drive leads more efficiently.
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
In prosperity,
David Wood
Comments
Oliver Thompson
This article provided me with a much clearer understanding of how to target specific cities with pay-per-call keyword research. I was struggling with my own campaign, but now I know exactly what cities to focus on and how to perform the research effectively. Thanks for breaking it down so well!
Emma Roberts
I find it hard to believe that using such a simple strategy could yield such amazing results. Could you perhaps share any case studies or statistics that back this up? It sounds too good to be true without some concrete evidence!
Michael Jenkins
Great post! I do have a couple of questions, though. How do you handle high competition keywords in cities like Los Angeles? Do you recommend sticking to smaller cities or is there a strategy for competing in larger markets?
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Isabella Cruz
While I understand the concept of targeting specific cities for lead generation, I think the approach of spreading out over random cities might dilute efforts. Building a single county-wide authority site seems more practical. What are your thoughts on this?
Liam Williams
Hey David! It’s been a while since we last chatted. I came across your post and it was really insightful. How have you been? We should catch up soon, maybe over a coffee? Let me know when you’re free.
Sophia Martinez
I remember facing a similar challenge when trying to generate leads for my own business. It took me months to figure out the importance of keyword research in different cities. Your method could have saved me a lot of time if I had found this sooner!
Benjamin Clark
There’s a tool I use called “CallRail” that helps with tracking leads for pay-per-call campaigns. It integrates well with most keyword research tools. Have you tried using it? It might complement your strategy!
Ava Brown
This post has been an eye-opener for me! I’ve always struggled with keyword research for local SEO, and now I finally get how to narrow down my focus to specific cities. Thanks for sharing your insights, I’m excited to try this out!
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I ran both versions of this. Spread thin across random low-competition cities, and consolidated under one county site with the small cities feeding it. The scattershot approach gave me a handful of sites limping along with barely any calls coming through, easy to abandon one at a time without noticing. The county-plus-cities structure held together because losing one small site didn’t kill the whole thing. If I were doing the keyword research again, I’d skip the random-city route entirely and go straight for the leveraged version.
Samir’s scattershot description matches what I see constantly. People build the random cheap-city sites first because they feel less risky, then watch most of them die quietly with no calls at all. It’s not impossible to make the spread-out version work, it’s just rare — the county-anchored structure he describes is the one that survives contact with a slow month.
Carving a market up by city population and picking off the ones over a threshold is straight out of the print directory playbook, we just called the threshold something else in the eighties. Whoever wrote this has reinvented the territory map, sensibly, with a modern tool doing the counting. The list of fifteen cities isn’t the innovation. Knowing which ones are worth bothering with, at all, is the same old judgment call it always was.
Whatever it was called in the eighties, this version at least is desk work. Pull a population list, run the searches, write the site. No cold call required.
Eighties or now, someone still has to run all fifteen searches by hand. History doesn’t do it for you.
I actually ran the keyword checks on this exact list a while back, different metro. Pulled the top fifteen cities by population, ran each one through the keyword tool, and only five cleared the 100-searches-a-month bar the post mentions. Two more cleared it once I added the profession to the phrase differently. Week one was the population list and the search counts, maybe three hours total. Week two was deciding between the scattershot build and the county-plus-cities structure, and that decision took longer than the actual research did. Nobody warns you that picking the strategy eats more time than finding the keywords.
The population list is very specific to Los Angeles county. In Turkey we do not have this kind of easy public city-by-city data. Is there another way to find the right cities to target when the county itself does not have a Wikipedia page like this?