What Is National SEO and What Will Work Best for Your Business?

Pick the Right Strategy to Boost Your Business Online

You’re a business with local customers, but you’re in the next stage of growth. You want to go national. Your website is key. More importantly, what you post on it is crucial. Using national search engine optimization strategies, you can attract a wider audience.

You see, national SEO is optimized for a larger audience. A national SEO campaign will use the right keywords to rank high across multiple SERPs. 

Nationwide SEO campaigns need to have a distinct set of goals to local campaigns. National campaigns are looking to rank for keywords that people search across the country. This means that they’re focused on keywords with high search volume and low competition.

Local SEO vs National SEO: What’s the difference?

Let’s remind ourselves of the function of SEO: to attract traffic to your website. So, what’s the difference between local and national SEO?

In simple terms, local SEO consists of optimizing your content for a specific location, while national SEO is about optimizing for the country that you wish to target.

National SEO gives you access to search engines that are available exclusively in that country. For example, Google.co.in offers Indian users different search results than Google.com would offer US users. Why? There are big regional differences in culture and language. 

Also, local SEO will only give results for the specific place where it operates ─ like Google Maps or Yelp ─ while national SEO will give results from all over its territory, like TripAdvisor or Amazon.

Here are six specific differences between local SEO and national SEO:

1. Focus

What’s your geographical location? If you’re located in a specific city or state and only serve customers there, then it would make sense to focus on local SEO. This provides an opportunity to rank better locally and generate higher numbers of conversions from searchers who are physically closer to your company.

However, if your business offers products and services that you wish to sell to a wider audience, or your business is in a rural location, it’s best to target national SEO to build your brand.

2. Complexity

National SEO campaigns are more complex and more difficult to tackle than local SEO campaigns. The strategy you use must be bigger to capture a national audience, including incorporating diverse types of content and advertising as well as local SEO.

3. Cost

When costing out for strategic SEO, national SEO will be more expensive. You’ll need to consider factors such as your specific objectives, the size of your target audience, the quality of content you need to publish, and the competitiveness of your industry, as well as the services and products you offer.

4. Audience

Your audience will be bigger, but you must still focus on needs. You need to be clear about who your ideal customer is, otherwise you will get lost in the competition, and your content will not be focused enough to attract and engage an audience.

5. Keywords

Keyword use is likely to be the most noticeable difference between national and local SEO. When targeting national audiences, you don’t need to be concerned about locational keywords ─ but you do need to target more keywords that are more difficult to rank for.

For example, if you are a business consultant targeting local clients in, say, Denver, you might use keywords such as ‘small business consulting Denver’. A national SEO strategy will target keywords such as ‘small business consulting services’ ─ many more search results, and therefore harder to rank for, but not impossible with the right strategy.

6. Competition

Going national means a bigger audience, and more competition. It’s going to get fierce. You’ll be competing against big national companies, so you need to have great branding. But don’t be put off. Get it right, and you really can compete against bigger companies with bigger budgets ─ that’s one of the tremendous advantages of the internet and national SEO strategies.

The benefits of national search engine optimization

There are many benefits of national SEO, but the most important ones are helping to build your brand, improving your online presence and traffic to your website, and advancing performance in terms of clicks and conversion rates. National SEO can help you to:

• Reach a broader audience
• Reduce marketing costs
• Obtain more and higher-quality leads
• Gain domain authority
• Increase website traffic

Should you embed national SEO in your online strategy?

If you’re a small business and you want to rank only for local search terms, then local SEO is the way to go. However, national SEO is where most customers are searching for products or services. Businesses that want to stay relevant, and grow to their full potential, should invest more in national search engine optimization than local search engine optimization.

Do you want to learn more about how a national SEO strategy can help your business to grow? Fill out the form below to gain access now.

And if you’ve been struggling with attracting traffic to your website, let me know in the comments below. I read every one and will try to help you.

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