What is National SEO? Comparing National SEO vs Local SEO

What Is National SEO?

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Your here so its safe to assume you’re looking to learn what is national SEO. well Search engine optimization (SEO) is a proven strategy for generating targeted traffic, quality leads, and e-commerce sales. Most times, the nature of a particular business determines the best approach to follow. Hence, there are variations from one context to another.

Because you have heard about it before, you are probably wondering if national SEO (search engine optimization) is the right approach for you to follow. Through this page, we’ll look into the core basics and other relevant points to help you decide if this type of SEO service is the best option to accomplish your marketing goals.

Before you commit to working with any SEO agency or consultant, let’s define the term and other factors you should consider in your business.

What Is National Search Engine Optimization

National SEO is a data-driven process of optimizing your website to rank high in search engines and generate considerable traffic volume from selected keywords and locations within a country. It is a type of SEO service utilized by nationwide businesses with the infrastructure to serve customers or clients anywhere in a specific country.

For example, if you have an ecommerce business with existing systems to deliver products anywhere in your country, national search engine optimization services could help towards the growth of your business.

Some examples of national SEO terms could consist of:

Without a professionally planned SEO strategy, you may get mismatched traffic from other countries. Unfortunately, such people will not buy from your business even when you have the type of products or services they need. In this case, it is not enough to bring people needing specific products pr services to your website. Location targeting is essential.

National SEO vs Local SEO Services

National SEO services cover an entire country and generate traffic from different locations. On the other hand, local search engine optimization focuses on generating targeted traffic from selected locations within a country. Selected locations may include states, cities, counties, or districts.

While national on-page and off-page SEO uses broad keywords used by searchers in different places, the local strategy focuses on keywords or search queries with location modifiers. These are keywords with location names attached to them. The essence is getting targeted traffic or prospects from your preferred locations.

Check out the following examples of location-based keywords.

Instead of broad search queries, adding location modifiers makes it possible to attract only the people searching for your products or services within specified locations. Do you have a multi-location business that is not operating nationwide? Local SEO services might be your best option.

Why Your Business May Need National SEO Services

Nationwide Coverage: Depending on how you look at the growth potential of your business, covering an entire country is better than going after a few selected locations. With a national SEO strategy, you’ll expand the digital horizon from which your business could be getting new customers consistently. Assuming you have the capacity or infrastructure to deliver your products and services anywhere within the country, this type of SEO service is for you.

You Have An Online Business – For some types of startups and online businesses, their products or services can quickly be delivered to anyone, anywhere within a country. If you have this type of business, it is time to start thinking about giving your search engine optimization strategy a national focus. Perhaps, you may need professional help or an SEO audit to get started on the right track.

Higher Traffic Potential: The volume of traffic you can get from your SEO activities is usually measured in search volume for every specific keyword. When you focus on a few selected locations with limited keywords with low search volume, the potential traffic you can get from your SEO will be limited. It would help if you had national SEO to go broad with more keywords with higher search volume and traffic potential. Even though this approach is more competitive than local SEO, it is usually worth it.

You Have The Resources – Whether you want to outsource the project or hire an in-house SEO expert, you probably have the resources to get started with such a marketing strategy. Unlike other marketing activities, search engine optimization allows you to attract people who need your services, especially when searching for them within specified locations. The best part is that you can always measure the results in traffic volume, quality leads, appointment bookings, sales, and ROI.

How To Rank Nationally For Your Target Keywords

SEO Audit

Before you request or accept any quote from search engine optimization agencies, ensure an in-depth audit is conducted on your website. With a professional SEO audit, anybody giving you a quote probably depends on guesswork. And that’s not a good place to start. If done very well, the detailed audit will help everyone involved to understand your website’s current status against national competitors and preferred target keywords.

The audit will lay the foundation for optimization work needed to get your website ranking for high-potential search queries. With some comparative analysis, the audit should focus on ranking factors like those listed here.

Site URL structuring
Page title optimization
Website loading speed
Mobile usability
Internal linking and crawlability
Broken URL discovery
Duplicate content issues
Structured data inclusion
Sitemap optimization
Inbound backlinks

Keyword Research

Ranking high enough and generating significant traffic volume requires keyword research. Again, you can’t rely on guesswork regarding which keywords to target and then expect to get maximum results from your SEO efforts. After setting your target country within the Google Search Console set-up, you need to research to find the best search queries that will give you the highest ROI.

At this point, it is worth noting that all keywords are not equal in terms of ROI potential. That’s why you don’t need to rely on guesswork. Getting traffic from your national SEO strategies is not enough. It has to be quality traffic. And that, my friend, has much to do with keyword research.

Content Creation

If you designed your website and forgot about it, now is the time to think differently. Technically, you can hardly achieve national SEO success without strategic content creation.

If you are struggling with content ideation or deciding what type of content to create, consulting an SEO expert will put you on the right track. With every piece of content you create, your website’s potential for generating traffic from selected keywords will increase. At this stage, you may want to analyze the type of content that your first-page ranking competitors are using to get traffic from your target search queries.

Internal Linking

Linking from one page in your website to another increases the SEO ranking score. Unfortunately, if you have ignored this for a long time, it is one of the simplest tasks you can implement to increase your ranking and traffic on a national level. Another thing worth considering is the moderate use of your target keywords to link from one page to another.

The more SEO-optimized internal links you add, the more links Google will have to crawl, recrawl, index, and rank your website. Without proper internal linking, you probably create orphaned pages that stand alone on the internet.

Link Building

Currently, what are you doing to build inbound links to boost your website’s ranking for national SEO? If your answer is nothing, you’ve got some work.

Basically, link building is about creating digital pathways that could lead human visitors and search crawlers from other websites to your site. When you conduct a deep SEO competition analysis on a national level, you might be surprised that some of your top-ranking competitors have thousands of backlinks from other related websites in their niche.

Your task is to build the links consistently or outsource the work to a reputable national SEO agency. Below are some of the best link-building strategies.

Create expert roundups
Use guest posting
Local business directories
Press releases
Broken link building
Claiming unlinked brand mentions
Creation of sharable content
Give testimonials and get links
Niche edit and link insertion
HARO link building
Podcast interviews
Create free tools

Performance Tracking

How can performance tracking help you rank nationally for your target search queries?

When you begin to invest seriously in a strategic national SEO campaign, you are bound to see some mixed results. Tracking your SEO ranking will help you identify the best and lowest performing keywords. Between the best and the worst performers, you’ll also find other keywords with many ranking and traffic potential. For example, keywords ranking in positions #1 – 10 on Google’s second page often hold great potential for easy ranking improvement.

Depending on the size of your website, improving the ranking of selected keywords and pages on the second page will increase your traffic volume. Even on Google’s first page, moving one of your top-ranking pages from position #8 to #1 -3 will have a noticeable impact on your traffic volume.

But then, you cannot use the data and insights for progressive improvement unless you track performance. For this, you can use some SEO tools like Google Search Console, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and many other tools.

Final Thoughts on National SEO

Besides defining what is national SEO, this post clarifies other essential factors you should consider before committing to any marketing agency. As you can see, it is more about the depth of keyword research and location preferences. Through the previous sections, we have also highlighted the benefits of search engine optimization on a national level.

Now that you know the basics and other relevant factors, it is time to consider the nature of your business and decide the most suitable approach to achieve your current marketing goals.

Finally, don’t just go blindly through spaghetti on the wall and hope something sticks. Make sure an integrated performance tracking system is part of your overall strategy. And or give us a call we’ve thrown enough spaghetti for everybody. But actually, we know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two ( bonus points if you get the reference) we are a primarily SEO agency meaning that is all we offer. We have done this because of all of the work we have done and tested, we know what works because that’s what we do. Give us a call today and lets talk about how Our SEO campaign alone will blow away any other marketing campaign your running.