Local vs. National SEO:
What’s the Difference?
Need help in understanding the difference between national and local SEO?
Wondering what type of SEO is right for your business?
If you’re new to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, you may not fully understand what the difference is between local and national SEO. While many things are similar between the two, there are also some key differences that you’ll need to know about.
It’s important to understand these differences so that you don’t waste your time, energy, or resources on implementing SEO techniques that won’t help move your business forward.
Ready to learn more? Below we’ll explain the key differences between local and national SEO.
The Target Audience
One of the biggest differences between the two types of SEO is the audience you’ll be targeting.
With national SEO, you’ll be focusing on reaching anyone and everyone that you can, even if they aren’t likely to walk into your physical business location anytime soon. With local SEO, you’ll target people who are in the same regional area or city that your business is.
A small local business that doesn’t sell products online will be wasting their time and effort if they attempt to target the entire country. Likewise, an e-commerce shop that ships all over the country will most likely want to target a national audience with their SEO efforts instead of people in a specific city.
The Keywords
The keywords you’ll choose to use with local SEO and national SEO will also differ quite a bit.
With national SEO you’ll create valuable content and target long-tail keywords that relate to your industry, your products, your services, and your area of expertise. With local SEO, you’ll do the same. However, you’ll also want to add in geographically relevant keywords as well, such as the name of your city, your state, or your region.
Geographic keywords and locally-optimized content will help serve as a signal to Google of where a business is located and what visitors they should send to it. Without these keywords, a local business may get visitors who are looking for their products or services but are on the other side of the country.
