When you hear local SEO and national SEO, what comes to your mind? The term ‘SEO‘ (Search Engine Marketing) is a household name when it comes to digital marketing. For business owners that have decided to utilize digital marketing for their brand promotion, SEO should not be far away from them. So many brands are using SEO as a means to boost their awareness. SEO helps you attract customers without having to spend a dime on advertising. They have realised that being relevant online is the best place for any brand. Increased relevance and visibility is equal to increased sales. SEO is becoming lucrative in today’s market, you can’t afford to neglect it. Hoping to make that big sale, invest in SEO today!
Some brands have worked on their SEO and even gone as far as researching for the right keyword to use to distinguish their business/product/business online. You know if consumer search for you and they don’t find you, they’ll surely find your competitions, you know what that means. In SEO, every feature on your page must be optimized so your website can be ranked. In case you’ve done an amazing job but if your brand is unable to rank locally, your effort might not be as fruitful as you want.
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For you to make your brand rank locally, you need to go beyond the usual SEO. SEO is simply making your website/page relevant online by making rank high through traffic and search engine results. SEO can be classified as a form of marketing that uses contents to attract potential customers.
To rank nationally and locally, you have to use the right SEO strategies and approach. The strategies are LOCAL SEO and NATIONAL SEO. These are strategies are often confusing to some people. Both strategies share the same principles but share different goals. They also function for different business scale. This post will explain in details both strategies and which is best for your brand. Below are what you need to know about both strategies.
What Is Local And National SEO?
Local SEO is the optimization of your website so it can be relevant and rank better locally. It allows the local audience to find your website easily. It increases the visibility of your page to people in your geographical location. It’s also providing services and getting prospective customers in your local environment. It’s less expensive to set up and maintain. This strategy of SEO benefits small and new businesses. Business owners can easily take over the market in their locality with this strategy.
For this SEO strategy, there’s less competition but requires a large team to handle. It would also get you more leads. It’s also good for a small scale, local brands/businesses.
National SEO is all about reaching a large range of audience nationally and globally. Focusing on a particular location is not important in this strategy. This is often used by businesses that run basically online. It isn’t restricted to one area so your website can be seen on a global scale but it’s more expensive. It attracts traffic both nationally and internationally. The campaign is also more complex and expensive than local. Since you’re aiming to rank on a global scale, the competition is very high and you would a lot of time before you get the relevance you desire.
You might wonder which of the strategies you should pick between both of them since they both sound amazing. For you to be able to take over your industry, you should be relevant in your geographical area before spreading your wings. With the description above you already know the SEO strategy (Local SEO) to go for. Also, the higher your website gets ranked locally, the higher it gets ranked nationally.
Both local and national SEO aims to increase the rank of every website on search engines and increase conversion. They both use keywords and page titles need to be optimized that would attract traffic to the website. Both strategies acquire backlinks from resource pages. They both use content marketing to attract traffic to websites but their reaches are different.
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How To Optimize Your Website For Local SEO
Are you searching for ways on how to optimize your website to local SEO? Your search has ended! We’re have carefully researched and put together ways you can achieve this in a short space of time. Educate yourself!
1. You Need To Optimize Your Homepage
For you to rank locally, your homepage needs to indicate what your brand is all about, the products/services you offer and your geographical location. While indicating all these, simplify it in a way Google can understand by using keywords. If you’re using WordPress to build your site, your header, meta description and title must state this information in clear terms.
2. Place Your Address In Your Footer
This tip is one of the most important cues that search engines use to find every website and link them to a particular location/ locations. Ensure that your NAP (Name, Address and Phone number) is similar everywhere you get to use it. You also add visuals when incorporating a NAP on the pages your audience visit more often.
3. Optimize Your Business Description
Every visitor that lands on your page are a potential customer, that’s the reason you must ensure they leave with a positive impression. Your meta description involves your page title and the description of your services/products. Ensure keywords that resonate with your geographical area are being used all through in order to help your page rank. The name of the city you want to focus on can be in your title/title page. This tells the search engines where you can be found. In describing your products/services, indicate your location as well.
4. Link Your Business To Local Directories
You would find several directories for different industries on the internet. Ensure you add your business page to those directories, it would help customers find your page easily once the location is indicated. It would also improve your SEO which would increase your ranking. Pay close attention to the listings and make sure they match what’s on your website.
5. Make A Page For Each Product/Services
Fixing all your products/services on a single page will affect SEO and it would prevent your website from being ranked locally. You have to create a separate page for each of the products/services. Also, bear in mind that you need to attach a location to each of those pages. Doing this also helps the site maps and search engines. It would take quite a lot of time to create these pages but it would your page rank locally which leads to more traffic.
6. Create Local Contents
Creating relevant contents is more important than creating contents that people won’t read. Make sure you create contents that people in your geographical location can relate with. To get these content ideas, you need to do thorough keyword research so they find those contents easily. From videos, infographics to blog posts, implement those keywords in all kinds of content you get to create. You need to be persistent in adding these keywords to the contents. When you apply this tip to your contents, you will notice the increase in your traffic and local ranking.
7. Add Reviews To Your Website
The impact of reviews on any brand can never be overemphasized. We all know how effective review is on any business/brand/product. Reviews do not promote brand awareness, it increases the activities on the website, which means more traffic. When clients in your locality can approve of your brand/product/service’s professionalism, your local ranking begins to increase. You always come up in people’s search results online. Ensure you prioritize reviews, those validations are your keys to unlocking new customers.
8. Set Up Signals On Your Social Media Accounts
We all know the impact of social media on marketing, it also helps with ranking. Don’t just set up social media accounts, make sure you set up their signals. Having social media platforms that indicate the location of your business is an additional advantage to ranking locally. Your potential customers can find out your location through your social media platforms. Those in your geographical area will always consider you when they need the services you offer.
SEO has the ability to connect customers to business/brands/products. You get relevant in one day, it takes a gradual and consistent effort from your team to get recognised locally by search engines. SEO requires a long-term commitment to ensuring it works. You just have to be persistent and make sure you use the right tools.
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With all these tips provided, achieving the local ranking can be overwhelming and tasking. We would recommend that you allow us to handle that aspect for you. DigitalMatrix is proficient in making sure your brand is established and relevant locally. We have experts that understand what it takes and the tools needed to make your website rank. We’ll create the right strategies that will work for your brand/business/product.
All you need to is contact us and you won’t regret this act!
