keyword research for local business

how can I accurately create a keyword focus for this region?

[TheScholar]

I have been working on a site for a few months, the client does lets say, <snip> repairs, on all types of [products]. So we have lets say:

[equipment] repair

there are lets say well over 100 'basic' keyword terms that would be NON-region specific.

So since my target market is extremely specific, I am struggling to figure out a list of 50 specific keyword terms that would bring in good targetted traffic. The site is up and looking OK, just when someone in the region this client serves go to google and searches, how the hell can I know what would give me even 50% of the keyword terms? I feel lost...

I looked at [various keyword tools]

I know this:

Looking at general keyword terms <snip> globally gets a lot of searches, but narrowing that down to something worth investing time into for the client ... This is a tricky business!

I'm sure there must be a working practice to do this type of task. It is killing me that I know I'm spending a lot of time optimizing for terms I don't even know if they get 10 searches a month in the region!

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 7:06 pm (utc) on Jun 2, 2010]
[edit reason] No specifics please, see forum charter [/edit]

[Receptional Andy]

It's an unfortunate fact that the internet is still not ideal for reaching very local audiences. Perhaps this is because when people are online, they are part of a different type of "geography" defined more by the sites they visit, than a physical location.

In any case, if it's keyword traffic from search engines you want, I would suggest you cover the most popular keywords and modify them with the various relevant locations. If the locations are popular enough, then you may want a hierarchy:

widgets (in) country
widgets (in) county
widgets (in) town

You may also need to cover [country widgets], but that is usually straightforward to target alongside the above patterns.

It may be that the target audience is too small for SEO to be a genuinely worthwhile undertaking, particularly if targeting a very small area. If you're not confident the number of searches warrant the investment in SEO, then a well-crafted Adwords campaign can give you real data without undue cost.