Local SEO 

Have you ever found yourself on vacation searching on your phone for the “best local restaurants in X city?” Or maybe you are looking for a service for a home project and so you search, “best contractors in Jacksonville, FL.” Your search results are Local SEO at work.  

With 1.5 billion “near me” searches each month, local SEO is a powerful tool for location-based businesses. Local SEO allows a business to drive traffic from within a geographical radius. Perfect for boosting visibility in searches across “X” City, local SEO helps improve your rankings for customers searching in your area. 

WHO SHOULD USE IT 

Brick and mortar stores, operations that depend on foot traffic, companies who gain business through local referrals, businesses that operate within a specific town, city, or region. Local SEO is useful for businesses with both a national presence and area specific branches. 

LOCAL SEO STRATEGY 

Optimize your Google Business Profile: Ensure that your business is verified, complete all fields and include descriptions of products and services.  

Reviews and testimonials: Reviews and testimonials build confidence in potential customers. Respond to reviews, whether positive or negative, and create processes to ethically ask for reviews after people engage with your business.   

Maintain consistent NAP: Ensure your name, address and phone number are correct and consistent online and that this information matches what is on your website.  Common search citations show up on Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Instagram, Facebook, and other US citation sources.  It is important to find incorrect listings for your business and update those as well. Correct NAP improves both your accessibility and visibility in search results.  

Local Keywords: Use local keywords on your website to help Google know your business is relevant for searches in your area. For example, if you own a coffee shop and you want to improve your keyword search. You could use words such as “coffee shop and bakery on Bay Street,” “best coffee shop in Jacksonville,” “cozy coffee shop and bakery downtown,” etc. to have specific terms about your business while including words customers use in searches.  

National SEO  

While local SEO helps you with area specific searches, national SEO is a long-term strategy that improves broader searches and rankings. While keywords for local SEO targets words that favor a specific area or region, national SEO utilizes high-volume words that build brand awareness across an industry. Take the coffee shop example above. If you own an organic coffee roastery that ships nationwide, a national SEO strategy may find keywords such as “organic online coffee roastery” to be a better fit.  

WHO SHOULD USE IT 

Companies who don’t require local foot traffic for business and those with a national presence benefit from a national SEO strategy. E-commerce brands and online retailers with the ability to ship nationwide are a natural fit as they want to use more generic words rather than location specific. National SEO strategies are ideal for subscription-based companies like Salesforce or Zoom, where the subscription is delivered over the internet, and any updates or maintenance is managed remotely. National SEO also benefits franchises or companies that serve more than one region and educational platforms that sell a product across state lines. 

NATIONAL SEO STRATEGY 

National Keyword Search and Analysis: Identify high-volume, industry keywords to combine with long-tail keywords that describe your customer’s intent.  If you owned an e-commerce brand that sells outerwear you might use a broad word such as “jacket” combined with “women’s high-warmth puffer.” Use platforms to help with this process such as  Semrush, Google Keyword Planner, and Moz Keyword Explorer.  

High Quality and Scalable Content: High quality content is an important component of a national SEO strategy. Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines are helpful to ensure that the content you publish will be evaluated as credible, helpful, and trustworthy. The E-E-A-T, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, framework impacts how your business ranks in search results. Easy ways to demonstrate this for your company include: first-hand reviews and case studies (experience), detailed author bios and in-depth guides (expertise), backlinks from reputable sites, guest appearances on podcasts or interviews (authoritative), and having a clear “about us” page, linking to other trusted sources, and fact checking prior to publishing (trustworthy).   

Website Optimization: Speed, Structure, and Mobile Capabilities. Companies with a well-developed national SEO strategy have websites that load in under 2.5 seconds. The websites are technically and organizationally strong, and they are easy to navigate on a mobile device. Using a schema markup, structured data that is in the form of code, on your website is a great addition that helps search engines appropriately understand your content, display rich snippets and increase your click-through rates.   

It is important to note that a national SEO strategy is a longer-term effort that requires greater financial investment than Local SEO. Determining the right strategy for your business and then sticking with it will pay off for your business in the long run though. If you are looking to determine which strategy your business needs, JSK Marketing is here to help. Let us focus on climbing the Google ladder while you focus on growing your business.