Are you giving your competitors an edge over you without even realising it? If you have a local business and haven’t looked into localised SEO, you’re probably going to fail. Let’s look at Local vs National SEO.
The goal of national SEO is to improve rankings across the whole country. So, you’d get customers from all over the country, which is important for bigger businesses.
If you have a small business, on the other hand, you’re likely to get a lot more out of local SEO and focusing on local clients. Putting the location of your business in your keywords will help you find customers in your area. For example, if you own a cafe in Shrewsbury, you might use the words;
Cafe in Shrewsbury
Shrewsbury Coffee Shops
What is National SEO?
Because national SEO is, well, national, it helps bigger companies more. They can use general keywords and still get the benefits because they are big enough. Most of the time, these kinds of businesses have been around for a while. They’ve made a name for themselves, so they’ll be at the top of search results. When you use national SEO, it’s much harder to rank well in search engines because it’s likely that other businesses like yours are already using the keywords you want to rank for. General keywords won’t help small businesses because all the top spots have already been taken.
National SEO is only useful if your business is very specific, like you’re the only one in the country who does what you do, or if you only do business online. If you don’t have a physical location, you can’t really work locally. Even a big company like Asda with enough money to buy the more expensive keywords could benefit from it.
But let’s say you own a nice little cafe in Shrewsbury. You probably won’t be in the top searches for best cafes in general, but you could be in the top searches for best cafes in Shrewsbury. Localised keywords will cost less and be more useful.
The best thing you can do is make content with local keywords in it. Make a blog section for your website. Research has shown that businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than those without. With a block of content, you can put keywords in different places.
Have a location page on your website so that local customers can easily find out where you’re based. If you have more than one location, be sure to list them all.
We’re Experts at Web Design and SEO
Localised SEO can help small businesses grow. For example, you could become the best cafe in Shrewsbury, then try to become the best cafe in Shropshire, and then try to become the best cafe in the West Midlands. Trying to be the best cafe in the UK right away won’t work. That’s like trying to run a 10k when you don’t even know how to walk.
If you are having trouble with SEO, get in touch! We are a Shropshire web design agency that is happy to help.