If you aren’t familiar with local SEO vs. global SEO, not to worry – the best local SEO courses are a great place to enhance your knowledge, and help you differentiate between the two!
In any SEO field, it’s essential to know these two strands of optimization to understand how you can adapt your marketing strategy when improving Google local business ranking performance.
The key difference between the two is:
- Global SEO (aka international SEO) means you target a range of customers across the world, without dialing into a single specific area.
- Local SEO is where you’re gunning for specific rankings in targeted regions, usually within your local area of operation.
Let’s explore both SEO types further to explain why it’s crucial to pick the right strategy to reach your optimization goals.
Picking the Right SEO Strategy: Global SEO vs Local SEO
Choosing between global and local SEO depends entirely on your business goals and aspirations. Both are viable approaches and each has a valuable place, but the right solution depends on who you’re marketing to and the industry competition level.
Global SEO relies on targeting key phrases and driving traffic across a vast field of potential customers. However, competition for high-volume keywords can be fierce.
The advantage of local SEO is that if you’re looking to engage with local customers, you can use the localized portion of the Google algorithm to reach your target audience.
It’s critical to balance both SEO efforts to come up with a robust marketing strategy.
If you focus solely on local optimization, you could damage your global rankings if Google perceives that you only provide services in one particular area.
The Differences Between Global And Local SEO
To be 100% confident in our understanding of the variation between these SEO methods, let’s summarise the differences:
| Local SEO | Global SEO | |
| Target audience | Specific location | National or global |
| Emphasized content | Location-based | Top of the funnel |
| Pivotal SERP features | The map pack, Google My Business, Organic listings | Organic listings, PAA, and featured snippets |
| Important factor | Review acquisition | Backlink acquisition |
| Core focuses | NAP data and consistency (name, address, and phone number) | On-page user experience |
As we can see in the table, Local SEO is all about business citations, localized content, and having a presence on Google Maps.
Global SEO covers a broader audience, so marketers must concentrate on keyword research, quality content, and creating an excellent user experience.
You’ll find a fair few of these elements in local SEO, too, but they’ll look slightly different:
- Local SEO content creation is usually based on location or product pages rather than longer-form content such as blogs.
- Keyword research and implementation remain vital, but those target phrases will often include local qualifiers or location names.
- Listing management is key because consistent NAP data across, say, sixty directories will strengthen your rankings considerably.
- Google My Business comes into play as a substantial influence on local SEO, supporting review acquisition to establish validity and improve customer trust.
Unpaid, organic searches matched with localized keywords are also helpful and contribute towards your climb towards being featured on the map pack at the top of the Google SERP.
Local SEO works pretty much the same as global SEO at its core. The algorithm looks at locally modified keywords alongside local results, so establishing a rich content base on Google Maps and Google My Business is a great starting point – making it easier to find you!
How To Blend Local And Global SEO
One of the common problems business owners often face is when they want both types of SEO for the same business, but aren’t sure how to proceed. For example, if we think about a store with both a physical location and an online shop front, the owners will want feet coming in through the door and online customers.
Usually, the best plan is to create an approach to SEO that includes components of both strategies.
The beauty of SEO is that it is completely adaptable to your requirements, and there isn’t any universally ‘correct’ way to tackle it.
If you’re stuck on which factors to concentrate on, try revisiting your primary aims:
- Who do you want to engage with? Is your ideal target audience a local customer or an online client?
- What is your end goal? How will you quantify achieving that aim? What metrics do you need to qualify to get there?
- Can you build up a persona to evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO techniques?
- Why are you revising your SEO? Is it currently not working in a specific area or unable to attract a particular proportion of your customer base?
Once you’ve gone back to the drawing board and quantified precisely what you want to achieve, why, and through whom, you’ll be in a better position to start streamlining your SEO approach to combine parts of both strategies we’ve discussed here!