Local And National SEO Techniques

If you website provides service to people in a particular location or country then Local SEO, National SEO and On-Site Location Optimizations will help your website rank well in local search queries.

What is Local Search?

Local search are those searches which are constrained to a particular geographic location. In simple words we can say local search is when we search for something at a particular place or location.

Searching for restaurants at Bangalore or searching for tourist places in India. These both are referring to a particular location.

Local search can be implicit or explicit. Lets discuss them in details:

Local search is explicit when we mention the location and service. For example, “hospitals in bangalore” is treated to be explicit local search.

Local search is implicit when we mention the service only. For example, “gyms” is treated to be implicit search. Searches engines have the ability to identify search queries which are typically consumed locally. Here search engine identify the word “gyms” to be a local service and then they provide information about nearby gyms. When we make a implicit search, search engines use our IP address and search engine TLD(google.co.in, google.co.uk etc) to identify our country and location.

On-Site Optimization

Whenever users make a local search, search engines look for matching webpages with location keywords and service keywords. Having location specific keywords and service keywords in your webpages is called on-site optimization.

For example, if you have a website for your restaurant which is located in Bangalore, India. Suppose a user explicitly searches for “restaurants in bangalore”, then search engines look for the words “restaurants” and “bangalore” in your website. Therefore you need to have location and service keywords in your website. If a user from Bangalore would have implicitly searched for “restaurants” then search engines will change the query to “restaurants in bangalore” and then processed the query.

On-Site Optimization can be done using Postal Address Structured Data. And also by specifying country and/or city name in title, description and page content. Google will automatically parse and understand to which country and/or city you website provides services to.

National SEO

We saw how we can use On-Site optimizations to provide search engines about our location. But we can also explicitly provide location of our business. National And Local SEO helps us to provide details of our service and location to search engines explicitly.

National SEO is used to provide the country to which you provide services. Therefore people looking for services in that specific country will see your website.

You can signal search engines the country to which you provide services to by using the country specific TLD(.co.in, .co.kr, .co.uk etc). If you want to use non-country specific TLD(.com, .edu etc) and still want to tell search engines about your service country then use Google webmaster tools to specify the country. Visit this link and select country in Geographic target.

When you use country specific TLD, search engines only display your website in country specific search engines(i.e, qnimate.co.in will be displayed in google.co.in not in google.co.kr) for implicit search queries. But if user explicitly searches for it then search engines display our website in other TLD search engines.

For more information on it click here.

Local SEO

Using Local SEO you can provide exact location of your business.

For Local SEO you need to create a Business page in Google+ and go through extra validation steps. Local SEO will also add your office location to Google Maps. So if your website matches a search query(On-Site optimization) then along with your website name, your physical location will be shown in the search result.

For complete steps on Local SEO visit this link.

Conclusion

We can use on-site optimizations, local search and national search together to provide search engines all information about your business, therefore search engines will be more confident while showing your website in search result.