As a business owner, one of the first – and perhaps most important – decisions you’ll face when entering the world of online marketing is whether you should focus on attracting customers in your local area or to reach a wider audience across the country.
This decision determines your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and how effective this will be. If you target the wrong audience, while your website traffic may increase, those visitors are unlikely to become customers.
Choosing the right approach between local SEO vs national SEO ensures that your business is visible to the people who can convert into paying customers, giving you a stronger return on your marketing investment.
So, what is the difference between local and national SEO?
Local SEO
Local SEO focuses on attracting customers in your area to your website. The radius of local SEO isn’t set in stone. If you’re in a city, this could be as little as a few miles. If you’re based in a more rural area, this could be 20-30 miles or more.
For example, a plumber in Chester would benefit from targeting “emergency plumber in Chester”, as people searching for this term are looking for someone nearby – not someone based across the country.
Typically, local SEO focuses on your town, city or region. The exact radius can vary depending on several factors, including your industry, searcher intent of keywords and the level of competition in your area.
Some industries naturally serve a smaller area; for example, a coffee shop would generally attract customers within a few miles, while a mechanic may cover 20 miles or more.
Local SEO is the most effective when people are actively searching for services they can access nearby. When someone searches for “restaurants near me”, for instance, they’re looking for restaurants close to their geographical location. Because of this, Google prioritises businesses in their local area and shows these businesses in search results.
In busy cities, where there are many similar businesses offering the same services, an effective local SEO strategy may look at targeting a much smaller radius due to the density of competitors. On the other hand, in more rural areas, there may be fewer local competitors, therefore the radius can extend further.
For example, a coffee shop on the Isle of Skye may have a much wider local SEO radius than a coffee shop in London, simply because there are fewer alternatives nearby. The level of competition is therefore much smaller.
National SEO
On the other hand, national SEO focuses on reaching customers across the country, rather than just a specific area.
The keywords you target as part of a national SEO campaign are designed to appear to a broader audience and aren’t tied to a specific geographical location.
Because the potential reach of a national SEO campaign is far greater than that of a local campaign, the level of competition can be much higher. This is because you’ll often be competing with established national brands and businesses that have already built a strong online presence.
For instance, a jewellery brand that sells through an e-commerce site would benefit from targeting keywords that aren’t location-specific, such as “buy gold earrings online”.
People searching for this term aren’t looking for a shop nearby – they could be located anywhere in the country, or even beyond that.
As this service isn’t in-person, and the purchase can be made from anywhere, a localised approach wouldn’t be as effective. A national SEO campaign ensures that the business is visible to a much wider audience, rather than limiting itself to a small geographic area, allowing it to attract potential customers from a broader market.
National SEO campaigns are ideal for businesses that sell online, offer delivery or provide services that aren’t limited to a specific location.
By targeting broad, location-independent keywords, these campaigns can attract more visitors to a website, which can generate more leads or sales and help establish your brand as an authority in its industry.
Unsure whether your online business would benefit from a local or national SEO campaign? Reach out to the team at Engage Web today.
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