Should local businesses focus exclusively on a local SEO strategy (and forget traditional SEO)?
-
Hello Friends!
I work at a small, local company. We definitely want to rank high for local search , so we see the value of having a local SEO strategy.
But does it make sense for us to also invest in a traditional SEO strategy?
My understanding is that a traditional SEO strategy is focused on improving your site's visibility on a national or international scale. Does this make sense for my company if only local customers convert?
If we had unlimited time and resources, I'd be all for a traditional SEO strategy. I understand that the more traffic, backlinks, etc. my site generates from producing relevant content, the higher my ranking.
But my company has to be very strategic about where we spend our time since our resources are limited.
So...How much can or does a traditional SEO strategy impact local search results?
I'd hate to spend the time writing a beautiful SEO-optimized blog on dog grooming, for example, if that effort won't impact my SERP ranking when someone in my area searches for "dog grooming near me."
I'd love to hear your thoughts!
-
Hi Chris!
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my question. I'm really glad you brought up EAT, because you're right. We like to regularly blog to show EAT and to nurture relationships with customers and prospects. We just don't take the time to optimize our blogs for SEO. I wasn't sure if that was a worth-while venture as our primary goal is to be discovered by locals looking for our services.
I really like your suggestion of creating web pages that demonstrate EAT. Yes! Those pages are also a great opportunity to use local keywords and to showcase our brand.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question!
-
Anna,
I'd say you're definitely on the right path to more customers by focusing on the effectiveness of your local search first. And do keep in mind though, that it's not SEO you're after, it is customers. The beautiful writing about dog grooming is to inform your potential clients that you are an Expert at what you do, you are an Authority within your field, and that you and your business are Trustworthy entities.
A "blog" is not a necessity for a small company in a small niche to demonstrate EAT--you can do that with your individual pages. For most people with a business website online, I would venture to guess that the word "blog" brings up visions of a never-ending slog through the world of copy writing, wordpress-admin-techno-babble, and idea-generation for which they have to slice off a daily or weekly piece of their work time to wallow in. You are allowed to be free of that and still have a successful website.
For a wide variety of reasons, a huge number of business blogs are more hindrance to the company than help to their keyword rankings. Instead, use your internal services pages to develop EAT. Look at each of those individual pages about your areas of expertise as longer term creations that you adjust and modify as your business and your brand develop--a large part of which is, and should be, about your location. Incorporate locality and keywords into your those pages and have fun with them buy using them to display what makes you and your company you and your company.
When you're happy with your creations, you may decide that you want to continue to write and develop a blog, but do it because you want to, not because you think it's good for SEO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to rank in Google against a business with the same name?
My client has a coworking space in London, but shares its name with a recruitment company also in London. When searching for my client's brand name, they don't appear anywhere on the first page as this recruitment company dominates. How can I rank prominently for my brand term if there is someone else in these top spots who isn't a direct competitor (in the typical sense)? Thank you!
Local SEO | | WhitewallGlasgow0 -
Effective Real Estate SEO Strategies
I am looking to increase organic traffic to our Real Estate website, and am looking for any suggestions and or feedback as to strategies to implement in this area or even the must-have SEO pages every real-estate business should build. Interested in attracting sellers & buyers, but obviously would love more to attract sellers... The issue with that being you have to outrank the massive sites like Zillow and Realtor. Some ideas I have so far. Building out Neighbourhood pages to rank for people searching for 'Neighbourhood name' Any feedback on this one greatly appreciate. What's {city name} like? {Neighbourhood name} houses for sale What are good areas of {city name} Is {city name} a good place to live? What's {city name} like? What __ are in {city name} restaraunts hospitals beaches colleges How is {city names} weather Thanks guys!
Local SEO | | Dakota_G0 -
Another local fence company used (stole) one of my images
We have a local fence business in Oklahoma City and one of the other local fence companies took the liberty of using one of our images that I took myself on their website...creating a similar page even. They took the our image from this page: http://www.a-better-fence-construction.com/metal-fence-post.html And used it on their page (2x they used it!): http://fenceokc.com/2016/07/13/all-about-fence-posts/ They didn't even bother renaming the file "metal-fence-post.jpg"! I'm not experienced in what I should do? (I did a google image search and lots of websites are using it...but one contractor locally in OKC is using it and one in Dallas area is also using it.) I just wonder what other people are doing to prevent images being used or if your not worrying about it. Brad metal-fence-post.jpg
Local SEO | | SuperNovi0 -
Getting Schooled in Local by 'Lesser' Brands?
Hi Moz! First question I've asked here. I've been working on campaign for my company (regional solar installation company in Northeast USA) for close to 7 years, we've always done well in local search but recently have noticed sites that, for lack of a better word, we 'school' in terms of all the usual metrics - better/more consistent local listings, better domain strength, better backlink profile, bigger company (in the real world), brand recognition, etc... However recently we have started seeing smaller competitors beat us in state-specific rankings, using stuff I would call 'old school' SEO that is no longer really tolerated, in theory - stuffing keywords onto page, keywords in domain, etc... domains of much less strength pulling #1 or #2 terms. Based on data I don't actually think keywords like "solar + state name" are actually that powerfully but frankly it is bit embarrassing to get crushed by 1-2 person companies when you have a 150+ company with a three-person in-house digital marketing team. My strategy so far has consisted of building a better Google review solicitation process, adding schema markup to our project gallery, and some SEO 101 stuff like reworking keywords and title tags. I've noticed a strong uptick on our site of leads from outside our territory (like folks from all across the USA who are NOT in our service territory) - I'm almost thinking I've done 'too good' a job of building a nationally relevant website and not enough state-specific options. Has anyone ever experienced something like this? Any clever strategies beyond the obvious? Can share more specifics if it'll be helpful. Cheers,
Local SEO | | revisionsolar
Fred0 -
SEO and IP based content
Hello, We are building a guide/directory that will service multiple cities across Canada. Currently, our home page will detect your IP, and display local content on the home page. Although we feel this is incredibly useful to the end user, we are worried about how search engines will interpret our home page. In addition to our home page, should we have landing pages for each city that we are in? and should we follow site structure like this? www.thesite.com/vancouver So if a user from Vancouver goes to our home page, they will see Vancouver related content, but how would a search engine see the home page? We would like to know the best approach to placing well for searches in different Canadian cities. Most of our searches will be city specific: Calgary widgets, Vancouver widgets, etc. Thanks
Local SEO | | ebk0 -
Why do SMB owners want more calls as a result of SEO, but don't answer 62% of them?
Working mostly with SMBs for 8 years now, we have gradually developed the notion that small business owners are hard to reach by phone. Our Customer Service agents spend hours unsuccessfully trying to reach business owners. If a potential customer calls the business, they'll have to face the same outcome. This means missed opportunities for both parties. Needless to say, one of the most important KPIs in local SEO is the number of generated phone calls...but no one's there to answer. We wanted to dig deeper into the matter, so we did a small study with 85 businesses. Results show that: 37.8% of calls are answered by a person. 37.8% of calls are answered by an answering machine, where no actual conversation (nor conversion) is possible, so we treat these calls as unanswered. 24.3% of calls are unanswered. We also gathered a list of possible solutions to the problem, but what we really need to know is WHY do business owners neglect such an important part of their business? And what resolutions can you think of?
Local SEO | | 411Locals0 -
Multi location strategy - tracking keywords
I have very recently taken on a local business to manage and quite new to all of this. Your posts on the subject of multi-location SEO have been incredibly useful and the original blogpost on Local landing pages by Miriam Ellis is in my reading list and I am sure will be revisited regularly. I have another question on this obviously complex subject, what to do about tracking your keywords in MOZ Pro? I have subscribed and set up my main keywords and linked each to the 40 different service locations for our business, which is based in a single location but services a wide area, however this now gives me 400 keywords to track, which seems way too much and unmanageable. Can you give me some advice on how to make this much more effective? Many thanks, Sarah
Local SEO | | Mutatio_Digital0 -
Local SEO Best Practices for 2,000+ 'location' service area business
Hi Moz Community! We operate a business where we have a network of 2,000+ technicians around the country who help people repair their mobile phones. These techs do the fixing at the customer's location, making them service area businesses. Even after scouring all of the go-to places on local SEO, I'm struggling to find best practices for this type of situation - the fact that our techs are operating in service areas presents a number of challenges. The biggest one, it seems, is that inevitably service areas are going to overlap. When I talked to a Google rep on this he said this "might" cause our locations to get de-listed and we'd just have to test and find out. Other challenges include the fact that we cannot bulk upload the service areas of our techs, and we cannot bulk verify - meaning there is a ton of work to do at our scale. Any suggestions on where to go to find resources on this specific topic, or an example of someone doing this well we can model? Thanks everyone!
Local SEO | | JohnGroves1