The importance of Local SEO
Depending on who you want to reach, there are different SEO strategies that you will want to use to get your website ranking. While the majority people are trying to promote their local businesses, there are times where you may want to use a national SEO strategy. A user could be searching “Philadelphia DVD” for the movie Philadelphia or a place to buy DVDs in Philadelphia. Your target audience and SEO tactics will vary greatly depending on if you are using national or local SEO strategies.
Sometimes the choice is simple. Local businesses looking to increase transactions with customers in a small radius of their location will demand local SEO. The fundamentals of local and national SEO are similar, but location tagging is a much bigger focus for a local SEO campaign. The focus of a local SEO strategy is to show up in searches by people in your area, increasing exposure for the business and eventually bringing in traffic to either the website or brick & mortar location. For local SEO there is a lot of focus on getting your business listed in as many places online as possible. Local businesses should also focus on using their city, zip code or any other indicators of their location in title tags and other keyword areas. Luckily for local businesses, it is usually a simpler task to rank locally than it is nationally.
Why exactly is it harder to rank nationally?
The answer is competition. You are trying to reach a larger audience with broader keywords. There is a lot of competition for these keywords, but the payoff can be huge. Ranking nationally for specific keywords can lead to greatly increased traffic to a website and profits for a business.
If you are trying to sell books online, you have to compete with some companies who are already well established and already have aggressive SEO campaigns. With national SEO, it is important to have separate landing pages for different locations that would appear in searches in that area. Google Trends is a program that will allow you to see how key phrases that could be useful to your business are ranking. This program allows you to utilize its massive amount of regional and national data.
There can be a fine line between local and national SEO strategies, so it makes sense to understand what you want to accomplish with your SEO campaign. Local SEO certainly will find a place in a national SEO campaign but the world of Search Engines is constantly changing. Everything is becoming more personalized and more localized. With these changes, it is vital to integrate local SEO strategies into your online marketing, no matter what size and market your company serves.
