SBI Digital Marketing

How do you know if your SEO strategy is actually targeting the appropriate audience? SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization, and in a nutshell, it's how your business is showing up online to people. Your website and other online properties have an SEO score that is calculated by how your business currently stands in relation to keywords and search phrases that search engine users are putting into Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others when looking of the content, products, or services that your business might offer them.

Determining a search engine optimization strategy can be a very broad thing, as you might focus on something specific like establishing Web 2.0 properties, or instead focus on getting a page one ranking in Google. However, any conversation along this line of thought needs to start with whether your larger search engine optimization strategy is going to focus on local SEO or national SEO, sometimes also known as global SEO.

Local SEO is a term which encompasses targeting and searches that primarily originate within a particular geographic area around your business. Typically, this happens at a city or community level. Search terms which include the name of your city in them are usually considered to be local searches. For instance, if someone types 'Houston oil change' into their Chrome browser, then it sends a crystal clear signal to Google that the only results that should be provided would be results in and around the Houston metropolitan area, of course specifically listing oil change providers.

One other crucial aspect to keep in mind regarding local SEO is that Google actually displays results differently based on the geographic areas in question. The results are manipulated based on the assumed IP address of the searcher, given that IP addresses are often localized. If someone in Philadelphia searches for the term 'bakery', then they're going to get very different results than someone doing the same in Seattle. Additionally, the displayed Google Ads on the top of the page are going to be very different since such ads are geographically targeted too.

You might be wondering how competitive local search engine optimization can be. The answer honestly hinges on just what location you're talking about. For a big city like Los Angeles, the local SEO scene is going to be highly competitive given how many similar businesses are out there, many with big budgets they can sink into their SEO campaigns. On the other hand, Flagstaff, Arizona is a much smaller city, so the competition won't be nearly as fierce since the handful of area businesses are dealing with much smaller budgets for SEO and their digital marketing efforts.

Local SEO, generally, but not always, proves to be a less competitive field than the arenas of national and global SEO. In fact, if you tried to rank for the very term 'SEO' itself, you'd find it to be nearly impossible at this point in the Internet. On the other hand, if that SEO agency was in Flagstaff and wanted to reach out to local consumers and businesses, then it wouldn't be all that hard. If your business focuses on providing local consumers with products and services, then your best bet is likely emphasizing local SEO.

At this point, you're likely wondering what it takes to rank locally. Fortunately, local rankings can happen in a number of ways. If you want to learn about it a bit, search in Google using the terms you think someone would use to find your business, especially if they are search phrases or keywords you hope to master some day. For instance, searching for something like 'Flagstaff SEO services' will generate results that start with Google Ads, possibly followed by several Google Business properties. You might notice Yelp sometimes shows up pretty high in the rankings. What this shows you is that Google isn't always considering plumber websites themselves to be the most relevant links, instead relying on other sites that are highly ranked already, such as Yelp, in order to display businesses. If you don't have your business listed on Yelp, or if your reviews are lacking, then this is an area you should likely improve upon strategically.

So, even if you build a great website and go looking for backlinks and local references, make sure your local SEO campaign includes focus on how the Google properties of your business is established. Anything done that Google considers improper could wind up proving quite detrimental to your whole SEO strategy.

So, back to the question of what separates local SEO from national or global SEO? Local SEO zeroes in on a specific community with keywords containing city names. General keywords skew towards national SEO, which is harder to rank for and more expensive.