If you have been in the position to launch a marketing campaign online, SEO isn’t an alien concept to you. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential in giving visibility to your website in search engine result pages (SERPs). Coupled with an immersive web design, your website is well on its way to being ranked higher and getting in touch with your potential clients and visitors.
SEO is like that friend that always recommends the best spot to hang out – in order of their preferences and experience. To do SEO, you need to understand that it comes in two folds: National and Local SEO.
This article will explore everything you need to know about them and how to implement them for your SEO campaign.
What Is National SEO?
National SEO is the comprehensive process of strategizing and optimizing your website for visibility across the country. National SEO campaigns are best suited for online businesses whose physical premises aren’t relevant.
National SEO services are catered to clients and visitors across the country and all over the world. Thus, campaigns of this nature aim to place your business higher in search rankings to attract your customers on a national and international level.
You should recognize that you’re competing with other multinational brands to rank higher for the same keywords during SERPs in national SEO strategy.
How to Rank Nationally SEO
To cater to a wider audience, you need to know how to rank nationally SEO. In this section, we provide all the steps to take.
- Develop an SEO Plan
Before you begin some of your best national SEO strategies, you need to come up with a plan. The plan should involve your target audience, business objectives, potential stakeholders, and locations you want to rank for.
Your plan should be concise and comprehensive because it will form the foundation of every other thing you do next.
- Conduct Keyword Research
Google searches are becoming more personalized as it tries to deliver excellent service to users searching on their phones and PC. It considers the previous search history of the person before delivering new search results to them. Your SEO campaign should reflect that.
You need to list all the keywords related to your business, product, or service. Run those lists through SEO tools such as SEMRush, KeywordTool, Ahrefs, and Keyword Kegs to get additional insights and web analytics before incorporating them into your website.
- Implement Your Website Architecture
The next step is to develop your website to incorporate national SEO. But you need to decide if you need to create individual location web pages or develop micro-websites for each geo-location.
There are a lot of factors that will determine your final decision. Some of the factors include:
- Central base of operations
- Branch locations and service areas
- Service delivery.
These factors will determine how to structure the content for your website for a wider audience.
- Create High-quality Content
Content is king. Your website content should be engaging, interactive, and fun for people to patronize your products or services. It should cut across several geo-locations, as it is great for national SEO agency.
- Build Your Backlinks
You need to also build your backlinks to stand out from your rivals for your national SEO campaigns. Your websites need to refer to your website to earn a backlink. You need to be on the lookout to reclaim unlinked mentions, build broken lists, and guest posts on other websites.
National SEO Strategy
A national SEO strategy is excellent when you know what to do and implement them accordingly. National SEO experts and enthusiasts incorporate these strategies into their campaigns. They include:
- Incorporate infographics and other visual media into your website, blogs, and articles. It catches a lot of attention and ranks higher during SERPs.
- Advertise your website via guest posts on other websites.
- Deploy long-tail keyword research to promote your content to a wider audience.
- Incorporate Google Map optimization to achieve the best results in your marketing campaigns.
National SEO Campaign
National SEO campaigns aim to improve your business visibility and get it across to a national audience. If you have ever wondered how to rank nationally SEO, you should deploy the following strategies.
- Build a mobile and user-friendly website.
- Use keyword research to discover the best keywords for your website and industry.
- Build keyword mapping for incorporating some generic pages of your website.
- Create high-quality content with infographics and visual images.
- Build the SEO essentials on your website, such as meta title, meta description, URL strings, and heading tags.
These National SEO campaigns will give you the best results in placing your website in front of your potential visitors across the country and around the world.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is a concise strategy aimed at attracting local clients. Say you own a café in your town or city and want locals to patronize your business, local SEO is the way to go.
SEO for local campaigns ensure that local businesses are exposed to clients that need their services. In local SEO strategy, your website competes against other websites for more visibility in the area.
How To Do Local SEO
Local SEO is quite different from national SEO. Thus your local SEO strategy must be different. We’ve curated some of the best practices below.
- Create and Optimize Your Google My Business Profile
Google My Business (GMB) is an innovative resource to submit your business so that it can show up in results when specific keywords are searched. It shows up on the map for users to trace it easily. Here’s what it looks like during SERPs.
If you don’t have a Google My Business page, you need to create and optimize it. Your page should have your business name, contact numbers, URL, FAQs, photos, address, and reviews.
- Perform Local SEO Audit
Another way you can improve your local SEO strategy is to perform an audit. Local SEO is a continuous process, and you should be willing to make changes to suit your campaigns accordingly. Some of them include:
- Improve your visibility with Google My Business.
- Properly index your website with Google Search Console.
- Ensure your citations on business directories are correct.
- Examine your site with your competitors to see how well it matches up.
These implementations form the foundation of your SEO audit. You can hire local SEO experts to carry out a comprehensive audit for your site.
- Add Specific Locations To Your Web Pages
If your local business has a branch in another location, incorporate it into content on another web page. Do not make the mistake of duplicating the same content across multiple pages, as search engines frown on them.
- Create Local Content
To get the best result from local SEO services, you need to create localized content that will appeal to users when they stumble on your page. You can focus on specific news or events in your town and smoothly introduce your business.
- Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
According to research, 61% of all Google searches are done on mobile smartphones. It is essential to make your website mobile-friendly.
Local SEO Strategy
Have you ever wondered how to do local SEO successfully? We explore all the best practices below:
- Add your business’s location’s name in your local keyword optimization for your website. For instance, if you own a café in Kentucky, you can incorporate ‘café in Kentucky’ into your web pages.
- Incorporate the name of your business and location into your general content.
- Make your website compatible with mobile devices.
- Optimize your Google My Business profile.
- Update your on-page SEO, such as meta title and description, URL structure, internal link building, and keyword mapping.
Local SEO Campaign
To run a seamless campaign for your website, a local seo specialist deploy the following.
- Do keyword research for your business.
- Audit your website using SEO tools such as SemRush, Ahrefs, and Moz.
- Conduct competitor keyword research using the tools listed above.
- Create localized landing pages.
- Submit your business to local directories.
With these SEO campaign ideas, you can execute successful local SEO marketing.
National SEO VS Local SEO
While they might look similar, national and local SEO aren’t the same. We compare national SEO VS local SEO in the table below.
| National SEO | Local SEO |
| National/global area focus | Local area focus |
| Multinational competition | Local competition |
| Online businesses | Local businesses |
| Generic keywords | Geo-specific keywords |
With this table, you know exactly which SEO campaign to implement for your website.
Find SEO Experts Near Me
After deciding which SEO campaign to implement for your website, you’d need a professional to make it work – if you can’t do it yourself. You can simply search ‘SEO experts near me’ to get localized results.
Conclusion
SEO is a crucial aspect of online website campaigns and digital marketing. With all the information highlighted in the article, you’d be able to create a national or local SEO strategy for your website.