What Is the Difference Between Local and National SEO?


seo

In this digital era, businesses have to optimize their online presence through SEO strategies to attract new customers. Local SEO aims at driving more organic traffic to a website from a specific location, while national SEO aims at driving traffic to a site on a global level. Both local and national SEO share some principles but also have several differences. Below are more details regarding the two and how to determine which one to choose for your business.

Local SEO

Some of the businesses that can greatly benefit from local SEO include restaurants, beauty salons, and bars. During local SEO campaigns, an SEO expert focuses on keywords relevant to the location of the business. These may include the physical address and name of the city. They then optimize the search properly to make it easy for people to find the business. When compared to national SEO, local SEO is cheaper and has less competition. 

National SEO

National SEO is ideal for large corporations, online shops, and franchises. Basically, it’s suitable for businesses that offer online services or those that can ship their orders to different places around the world. National SEO is a bit more complicated than local SEO. Competition is also very high, and businesses have to adopt the best SEO practices or seek the services of an SEO company to rank higher.

One of the most notable similarities between local and national SEO is that they all have a goal to improve the ranking of a website on the search engine results page (SERP). The main difference between these two is where the visitors are coming from. For local SEO, you target visitors who live near where your business is located. For national SEO, you target people across the whole country where the business is and, at times, across the world. 

Strategies Involved in Local SEO

Some of the strategies used in local SEO include:

  • Using the name of the city where a business is located throughout the website
  • Regularly updating Google my business information 
  • Creating social media profiles on websites and including all the business contact information
  • Making pages for each physical location on the business website

Strategies Involved in National SEO

Some of the commonly used strategies on national SEO include

  • Ensuring that the site s mobile friendly and is loading quickly
  • Using tools like heading tags, URL strings, and meta tags
  • Creating high-quality content
  • Carrying out keyword mapping and keyword research into specific pages of a website to come up with the best keywords

How To Determine Whether to Go for Local or National SEO

If your business is small or medium-sized and relies on local consumption, local SEO will be the ideal option. For example, if you offer salon services, your focus should be on the local people who can visit you and get your services. It will be very hard for someone to fly from another country to come and seek your services. National SEO is mostly suitable for e-commerce businesses. Businesses that deal with physical products but can ship to other regions can benefit from it too. 

Both local and national SEO is good at helping a business achieve a high ranking. Local SEO may be cheaper and less complicated, but not suitable for all businesses. The same case with national SEO. There is no need to spend a lot of money on it, while local SEO could be more beneficial. Just decide on which one to adopt by considering the nature of your business.