Local SEO vs National SEO – Know the Difference

Could your website be missing out on a large portion of high quality, organic traffic?

As you invest time on running a website, you may have watched tutorials on SEO and now consider yourself, somewhat, an expert. Maybe your business’s website has a nice flow of monthly traffic. So that’s it right, SEO is all done? Maybe not. Let’s take a look at Local SEO vs National SEO so you can recognise the difference and boost your website rankings.

If you own a business and some of your customers are local to your premises, be it a shop or factory outlet, then you could be missing out on some good local leads.

Both Local and national SEO are important, but need two different approaches, to tackle the beast.

So in this article, let’s take a look at Local SEO vs National SEO.

What is Local SEO & National SEO?

National and local SEO both share the goal of getting your website to the top spot of the search engine results pages (SERP).

The first top spots on the SERP is where all the profits are made for online business. This is  because a large portion of organic traffic, a whopping 74% of people rarely click this first page.

But, where your customers are, is the major difference in the two types of SEO.

For national SEO, you’ll be targeting national and worldwide customers. This type of SEO is great for online brands, such as eCommerce websites or businesses selling their services and products across the nation or to a larger, wider audience.

Local SEO on the other hand is good for businesses which have local customers, within the area.

So local SEO will benefit small to medium businesses such as plumbers, electricians, clothes shops and bakeries, everyone with a local customer base.

National SEO 

National SEO, will benefit all internet-based companies from large corporations to small and growing eCommerce businesses. This strategy involves increasing brand awareness by getting your brand in front of many people as possible, regardless of their location.

The company will be targeting national customers looking to purchase clothes. And as such the company’s national SEO strategy, would start by using certain keywords like for instance, ‘buy stripy red T-shirts online‘.

Local SEO

As I mentioned before, Local SEO comes into play for the small, local businesses, with customers in the same area.

Targeting local trade will need a different SEO strategy than national SEO.

But local SEO is easier to rank at the top of the first page, as there is less competition plus Google also shows local companies that match a search query which is close to you.

For example: 

So using the clothes shop example again, but this time it’s a brick and mortar clothes shop.

The local SEO campaign will have the goal of getting as many local customers through the shop door as possible. So the website would rank for location-based keywords, as a start.

For instance, someone looking for a local clothes shop may type in ‘Stripy red T-shirts in Norwich’.

Google Business Listing

One of the most important SEO strategies for local businesses is the Google Business Profile listing option. This awesome free piece of advertising you can get a google ‘my account’ and a business listing that will show in search results, aimed at the keyword the user is searching for and who is local to your shop.

The listing will show all sorts of information such as your business address, location via google maps plus rated reviews, contact information and website links.

Conclusion

Of course, the world of SEO is massive, but this article ‘Local SEO vs National SEO, Know the Difference’ will help you out to start within determining which type of SEO you need for your business.

As discussed above, there are certain aspects that you would do differently in an SEO strategy, in regards to ranking a website locally to trying to achieve a national number one spot on the search engines results pages.

So are you going to give local SEO a try and win organic local SEO traffic?