Your business is growing by leaps and bounds. Your product is flying off the shelves, and your services are being used by people all over the globe. Maybe you've opened a new location, or two, or five!
This is great news! And now you're ready to expand your web presence to reach a bigger audience!
But what if you've only focused on building your local SEO? You have amazing search results when someone is looking for you from down the street. But, what if you are hoping someone will find you from across the state? Or across the country?
It should come as no surprise that it takes a pivot in strategy to fix reach those different audiences. Let's talk about 3 key differences in the two different strategies:
Local SEO is the Yellow Pages, National SEO is the Library of Congress
When you are looking for a service, what do you do? You head to Google to search, and your local results almost immediately come up.
That's the way the news goes: Search is a the new yellow pages. People go there first to find answers to their problems.
The same goes for national SEO, but it looks different. People come to national brands initial because they believe the can trust them. So a major key to building national SEO is to build trust: You are an expert in your field, and you want to help!
Content marketing is a key! Start creating helpful content, and start sharing it like crazy!
Don't Pivot, Create Something New
Your local SEO is winning! Don't break it; build something new.
If the local business has found success with a local SEO campaign and is driving lots of local traffic, it’s important to keep the current website as is and continue with a local SEO strategy in order to maintain that success. It’s going to take time to establish a national presence and the local presence is going to remain the bread and butter of your business for quite some time. In order to target a national audience, perhaps build a second website with a new domain!
Target National Keywords
Your site will be targeting broad, national keywords that are very competitive, so the content component of the new website and the marketing strategy behind the new website is extremely important! The new website should incorporate a blog that is updated every day with content that is applicable to a national audience. The age of a site plays a huge role in SEO success, so it’s best to focus on the content for the first two years before getting into much link building. Then, after year two the link building can be more aggressive.
Remember, SEO is an asset; it takes time to build. Even with the strongest SEO campaign, it will take 3-4 years to really start to see any kind of traction.