The first step to getting great results from a local search engine optimization campaign is figuring out what your goals are for your website. I know, I know, who wants to talk about goal setting and all that fluff? But I have to be honest, I hear so many business owners saying they want high rankings for such-and-such term or they want "x" amount of traffic per day and so on. That's the absolute WRONG way to go about this.  Let's talk about why that's the case and how you should approach things instead.

First, understand that taking care of this step should be fairly simple. You know your business and your market, right? The goal is to make sure your website marketing efforts are based on that knowledge, not some ill-conceived notion of wanting to rank for a specific search term.

A few key concepts to understand:

1. Really thinking about your customer, how your products and services can help them, and how they might search for those types of things online can help you dig up additional keywords that might not be as obvious but could be easier to rank for and just as beneficial to your business.
2. Just because you get a ton of traffic doesn't mean that traffic is any good. In the same way that not all customers are good customers, not all traffic is good traffic. General interest traffic from social bookmarking sites is one good example. That's not the kind of traffic you're looking for unless you sell something with mass appeal. Even then, you probably don't want looky-loo traffic coming from those types of sites. Nor do you want to rank for keywords that bring that type of traffic.
3. Often times, you can get an idea of how well certain traffic will convert by taking a look at the search terms being used and how generic they are.
4. Keep in mind that people might not be looking for your product or service by name, but may be looking for solutions to a problem that your business can solve.

Here's Are Some Quick Examples

Let's use an example from the real estate industry.

Let's say you're a real estate agent in Maryland. You may decide that you want to rank well for the term "Maryland real estate". Admittedly, that probably wouldn't be fatal to your business, but it would probably be much more difficult to rank for when compared to other, more focused terms.

So let's say you narrow it down further to "Maryland real estate agent". Much better. There's a high likelihood that someone searching for that term is actually looking for an agent. With the first example, that could be a student doing research, someone looking for property records, or any number of other things. So this could be a good term to attempt to rank for in the short term while saving the high rankings for the more generic term until later.

But also consider that people might be doing searches for solutions to problems that your product or service can address. So our Maryland real estate agent's local SEO campaign should also consider terms like "stop Maryland foreclosure", "sell Maryland house fast", "how do I do __________" related to real estate, etc.

See, it's really all about conversions and making you money, period.

Not how much traffic you get (unless you're making money selling ads). But for a real business, that means finding out what people are searching for online that would lead them to your site and which of those searches is most likely to be "buyer" traffic rather than "researcher" traffic.

That's why it's important to at least take a few minutes to really think about who your target market is, what are they likely to be searching for, what problem(s) do they have that you're able to help them solve, and so on.