How to Embrace Geography to Improve SEO
Geographically, SEO breaks down into three general groups. Those groups are local, national and international. When considering a new SEO campaign, it is essential that you pay close attention to which group you should focus on as you decide how to begin and move forward with your campaign. It is not uncommon to progress from local to national to international as your business and your marketing needs develop. Understanding the components of each strategy type will allow you to better comprehend how much time and resource you should allocate to this aspect of your business.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a service that is best suited to small businesses that are situated in a single location. If you operate a business that depends on local customers then this is a worthwhile investment. Ranking well on Google for a term that a large number of people are going to search can bring a game-changing amount of business to any small company. There are several steps that you should typically take to get started with local SEO. These steps include actions such as securing a Google local listing and Google+ page with a unique verification code, analysing your competitors and establishing which keywords you are going to work towards ranking for.
With local SEO campaigns, it is essential to procur as many citations on other well-established websites as possible. This is also a good way for people to naturally find your site and building long-lasting relationships of this kind will have continuos benefits for your business. It is also beneficial to list yourself on a selection of directory websites as this is an organic way for your website to be found amongst other industry similar businesses. This is also a simple way to procur some of those all important back-links.
National SEO
National search engine optimsation is the way to go when you want to attract customers from further afield. If you are making the move from local SEO to national because your business has expanded, then you already have a great base to work from and there are several tools at your disposal to help.
Google Trends is a particulary efficient tool for research of this kind, however, not many marketers are using it to their full potential. Tracking keyword popularity is one important use of Google Trends and will ensure that you are focusing your efforts on the correct keywords. With the information that it is possible to acquire from this tool, you will be able to understand when certain keyword phrases are declining in popularity, and therefore desist from working on them.
On a national level, it’s always helpful to have an adequate number of positive reviews, both on your website and separate sites. These reviews will generally come from past or current clients and serve to demonstrate your expertise and professionalism to potential clients or customers.
International SEO
Making the decision to up your SEO efforts to an international level can go a long way to increasing your overall return on investment as well as website traffic. Developing a strategy of this kind is, of course, only useful if you are trying to attract attention on a global scale. This will inevitably be a much more competetive and difficult task to achieve, requiring you to allocate a larger number of resources than you would for the average campaign.
International SEO will often involve campaigns in multiple languages and developing your website to have these language variations available is a fantastic idea. With this strategy choice, it is even more important to understand your competition. If you are just getting in to the game then there is going to be many businesses that are already several step ahead of you. Also, the bigger your campaign becomes, the more important it becomes to localize your content. This then extends into your link-building campaign as you target certain keywords in varying languages.
With any SEO campaign, regardless of the scale, it is pivotal to pay close attention to the results in order to better utilise your resources in the future. Wasting time on campaigns that are not high ROI keywords is of little to no use to your business. There are many tools at your disposal that will take a large amount of the legwork out of this process for you so there is no reason not to embrace this concept!
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