Question about keyword research

Hi everyone, I have a question that bothers me since I started working with SEO. How do you guys do keyword research for companies that offer local services. Let's talk about some roofing contractor that wants to be more visible in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. How do you want which keywords will be the best? You of course don't want people from Florida to find him. What would you do in this case? I used to come up with some keywords like:

roofing, roof repair, roof repairs, roofers, roof inspection, roof inspections, new roof, new roof installation

and areas:

New Jersey, NJ, Bucks County, PA, Pennsylvania

and I would mix them up. Should I take this mixed list and go to the Google Keywords Tool or market samurai to check it? Could anyone explain this process step by step?


Thank you

I'm very interested in this too.

Find a compeditors site that is doing well and plug it in to semrush and see what keywords they are going after.

That in addition to going over some of your example keywords in Adwords keyword tool will help set you on the right direction.

Just look at the Google places for your interest! That will show you everything - rankings, keywords and advertising strategy!

Strip those listings down, compare them and you will see your targeted main keyword. Then put them in keyword tool...find the most searched one....implement a little modification and make from that two keywords......try to rank both of them and you will outperform your competition in google definitely as long tail keywords will bring you more targeted visitors as they tend to convert better.

GL

The most popular would probably be the ones that require little thinking. Roofing for example would be: "roofing in XXXX"

or

"roof repair XXXX"

where XXXX is the city.
Just pop that into keyword tool and some suggestions should pop up.