As part of our agencies CORE marketing sessions its imperative that we fully understand our client’s target audience. In addition to determining their brand voice and communication pieces, we can’t overlook the importance of situating their business properly online.
For clients with a physical location, the communications and messaging is primarily directed to their locale. For people like me, this means we will likely be focusing more-so on Local SEO – that is ensuring they rank particularly well for searches within their geographic region.
Those that can provide products/services online or beyond their geographic region, we conduct a national SEO campaign. We’ll look at the differences between the two quickly, so you can identify what may be best for your business.
Local SEO – Here we suggest incorporating your geographic region in your on/off-page SEO strategy, combined with keywords that imply intent. For example: if we are a dentist in Kelowna, our keywords used may be ‘family dentist in kelowna’. Additionally, because we also service people of the surrounding area, we might build out location pages for every area we want to target customers from. I.e. ‘cosmetic dentistry services in West Kelowna, Peachland, Richmond, Surrey’, etc.
Another aspect we like to do with our Local SEO clients is to ensure they are submitted to all appropriate local directories, receive and maintain these profiles and respond to reviews in a timely fashion as this is shown to impact search engine performance.
National SEO on the other hand, ignores the need to include the city name in its SEO campaign strategy. Because these clients aren’t bound by geographic location, competition can be fierce for some keywords. Here keyword research and additional on/off-page SEO strategies are incredibly important. Because National SEO is typically more complex, we suggest you consult an SEO agency or consultant.
