Keyword selection for local offline

You're not going to find a lot of search volume data or CPC data for localized keywords (plumbers in new york, new york). You will need to analyze your competition and decide if it's worth it to try and outrank them. You will want to analyze their back link profile as well as the number of citations that they have.

You are looking for traffic. In local SEO, it is probably fairly low traffic compared to IM niches.

I only look at the competition to figure out what it is going to take to beat them, not to pick a keyword or not.

I take all keywords that have traffic. Depending on the type of business, I will sometimes take search queries that only have 10-12 searches a month. Really depends on what the business stands to make on it. If it is a pizza shop that might sell 1 extra pizza every 2 months, I wouldn't do that. If it is a real estate agent that could sell an extra house or two every few months, I will absolutely go after keywords with that low of search volume.

It is far different from what most IM'ers do when they are looking for easy to rank for keywords.

Generally though, in local SEO most keywords are fairly easy unless you are competing for something like "Restaurants in New York City".

I'm using a keyword analyzer and I'm targeting certain niches that are returning very low in competition, pr and competition strength but at the same time taking in 100-400 search queries a month. What do you guys think?

When it comes to Local search results any keyword selection tool out there is going to give you skewed data as just about all of them pull from the Adwords Keyword tool.

I've done hundreds of campaigns for local businesses and if you follow a few simple rules you'll do just fine on local search.
1) Put your base keyword phrase into your keyword research program for example just the word "plumber" instead of "plumber new york"(I prefer to just use the Google Keywords Tool set to exact match). If you get at least 1000 results more than likely you have a winner in your local area.

2) You can also check your city in the keyword tool, but keep in mind if you are in a city that could be in lots of different states, add in the abbreviation for your state (plumber glendale az). If you show any search volume when you add in the city you'll do well. Keep in mind that since this tool is meant to be used with Adwords you won't see any local terms appearing unless someone has been running an Adwords campaign improperly and targeting the city in their adsense keyword instead of targeting the keyword and then a city using the Campaign tools.

3) If you are still doubtful about whether or not there is search volume for the phrase, put the whole phrase (plumber glendale az) into Google and see if you get Places results. Google will normally only show the places results if people are actively searching for a phrase so it's a great confirmation that you've got a good keyword phrase.

4) For checking competition locally, I prefer to just search the phrase in Google using allintitle exact match. So you'd type the following: allintitle:"plumber glendale az" and check the amount of results. If you're seeing around 3000 or less you should be able to get decent first page results within a few months.

Keep in mind that unless you are in a huge city and a very popular industry you're not going to get 10's of thousands of visits a month, but even if you are able to get an extra 200-400 visitors a month, with only a 2% conversion rate you're getting an extra 4-8 customers per month which for most businesses is well worth the effort.

I know the post was a bit verbose but this is something that I cover with most of our new employees when training them in keyword research as we work with lots of small local companies.

For exact match domain names, would it be useful to use a word like "in" within the domain?

Example, plumber in ny -> plumberinny.com

I have a local keyword match that brings in 4,000 monthly search queries but it includes the word "in" so would it be smart to target this as an exact match domain?