Keyword Planner for Local Service Ads: Find Local Search Volume by City

By Corey Frankosky · Last Updated August 28, 2026

If you run a local service business, the first thing you need to know is that Local Services Ads do not use keywords at all. There is nothing to bid on and no keyword list to manage. That does not make Keyword Planner useless for you. It makes it the tool that tells you which services and which towns actually have demand, so you know where to point your Search campaigns, your service pages, and your Local Services Ads categories. In this guide you will learn how to pull local search volume by city, how to read the numbers honestly, and how to turn that into decisions about where you advertise.

1Local Services Ads Are Keywordless

Local Services Ads match on two things: the service categories you are verified for, and the service area you set. Google decides which searches you show up for. You do not add keywords, you do not set match types, and you do not bid on terms.

This trips people up because everything else in Google Ads works the opposite way. Advertisers go looking for the keyword tab in their Local Services Ads account, cannot find it, and assume something is broken. Nothing is broken. That is how the product works, and it is part of why Local Services Ads are simpler to run than Search campaigns.

So why open Keyword Planner? Because the decisions around your Local Services Ads still depend on demand data. Which categories you get verified for, which towns you include in your service area, which cities deserve their own landing page, and what your Search campaigns target alongside your Local Services Ads. Keyword Planner answers all of that. If you are still deciding between the two ad types, my breakdown of Local Services Ads vs Google Search Ads covers why I usually run both.

Question to Answer:

Do you know which service categories you are currently verified for in Local Services Ads?

2What Keyword Planner Is Actually For Here

For a local service business, Keyword Planner does four useful jobs. None of them involve feeding keywords into a Local Services Ads campaign.

• Ranking your towns by real demand. You find out that one suburb has meaningful search volume for your service and the next one over has almost none.
• Ranking your services by demand. Emergency work, routine work, and the niche service you rarely sell do not get searched at anything like the same rate.
• Feeding the Search campaigns that run beside your LSAs. These do use keywords, and they are where your service plus city list goes to work.
• Finding the junk before you pay for it. The same report shows you the job seeker and DIY searches you want to block.

If you want the full walkthrough of the tool itself, I have a dedicated Google Ads Keyword Planner tutorial. This guide stays focused on the local service angle.

3Pulling Search Volume for One City

You need a Google Ads account to use Keyword Planner, but you do not need an active campaign running. Here is the process.

1. Open the tool. In Google Ads, go to Tools, then Planning, then Keyword Planner.
2. Choose your starting point. Use Discover new keywords if you want Google to suggest terms from a seed like "tree removal." Use Get search volume and forecasts if you already have a list to check.
3. Set the location to one city. Click the location filter, type the city, and pick it from the dropdown. This is the step people skip.
4. Remove every other location. Click the small cross next to the country or any leftover region. If the United States is still in there, your numbers are national and useless for this.
5. Export before you change the location. Download the results, label the file with the city name, then swap the location and run the next town.

That last step matters more than it sounds. The temptation is to eyeball a few towns in the interface and move on. You want the exports, because the whole point is comparing towns side by side later.

Question to Answer:

When you last used Keyword Planner, was the location set to your actual service area or left on the country default?

4Building Your Service Plus City List

The list you want is every service you offer crossed with every place you serve. Write your services down the side and your locations across the top, then combine them.

Do this in a spreadsheet first. Keyword Planner is much faster when you paste in a finished list than when you build it term by term inside the tool. My local SEO keyword research strategy covers the same grid from the organic side, and the two lists overlap almost completely.

One note on "near me" terms. They show real volume, but you do not need to target them as keywords. Google resolves the location from the searcher, so your normal service terms already catch those searches when your location targeting is right.

5Reading Volume Ranges Without Fooling Yourself

Keyword Planner gives you a range, not a number. At the city level you will see buckets like 10 to 100 or 100 to 1,000, and a lot of your service plus city terms will come back with almost nothing. Both of those facts are normal, and both get misread constantly.

A range of 10 to 100 for "stump grinding" in a small town does not mean the keyword is worthless. It means the total addressable search demand in that town is small, and a handful of those searches a month might still be worth real money to you. Compare that against your job value. If a single job is worth a few thousand dollars, ten searches a month is a business.

The other trap is treating a zero as proof nobody wants the service. Low volume terms get rounded down and suppressed. If you know from your own phone calls that people ask for the service, trust your call log over a rounded range. Keyword Planner tells you about relative demand between towns and services. It is not a census.

Question to Answer:

Do you know what one job is worth to you, so you can judge whether a low volume town is still profitable?

6Deciding Which Towns Deserve a Campaign

Once you have the exports, sort your towns by total volume across all your services. A pattern usually shows up fast. A small number of places carry most of the demand, a middle group has some, and a long tail has almost none.

The mistake I see most often is building a separate campaign and a separate page for every town on the list. You end up with thirty thin pages competing with each other and thirty campaigns too small to ever exit the learning phase. Concentrate your budget and your content where the searches actually are, and let radius targeting pick up the rest.

7Choosing Your LSA Service Categories

This is where the keyword data loops back to Local Services Ads. You cannot pick keywords, but you do pick service categories during verification, and Google has been expanding those categories to be more specific about what you do.

Your Keyword Planner exports tell you which of your services carry the demand in your area. If the volume is concentrated in emergency work, make sure the emergency category is on your profile and that your profile is not padded with categories for services you barely sell. Getting matched to searches for work you do not really want is how you end up paying for leads you cannot service.

The same data should shape your service area. If a town shows almost no demand and is a forty minute drive, including it in your service area buys you very little and can pull you into leads you lose money on.

Question to Answer:

Are the categories on your Local Services Ads profile the services your keyword data says people are actually searching for?

8Pulling Negatives From the Same Report

While you have the keyword suggestions open, work down the list and pull out everything that is not a buyer. Local service categories attract a specific set of bad searches, and you can block most of them before your Search campaigns ever run.

• Job seekers. jobs, hiring, salary, careers, apprentice, and trade school. Very common in the trades.
• DIY and free. how to, DIY, free, cheap, and rental. These people are not calling a company.
• Training and licensing. course, certification, license, and school.
• Wrong location. city and state names outside your service area that show up in the suggestions.

These go into your Search campaigns, not your Local Services Ads, since there is nothing to attach them to in LSAs. My guide on Google Ads negative keywords has the full starter list I apply to almost every account.

9What Changes as LSAs Move Into Google Ads

Google is moving Local Services Ads into the main Google Ads interface, and the LSA-focused campaigns that come out of that migration are still keywordless. They target on service category and service area, the same as before. If you were hoping the move would finally let you add keywords to your LSAs, it does not.

What the migration does change is that your Local Services Ads and your Search campaigns will sit in the same account, which makes it much easier to compare cost per lead between them honestly. I wrote up the details in my post on Google moving LSAs into the Google Ads interface.

Nothing in this guide changes because of it. You still use Keyword Planner to find out where the demand is, then point your categories, your service area, your Search keywords, and your pages at it.