The world of SEO, short for search engine optimization, is constantly changing. Business owners need to keep up with the trends or risk falling by the wayside and losing clients or potential customers to their competitors. While the only way to ensure that a company’s site is in full compliance with Google’s standards is to hire a professional SEO company, more aggressive business owners may want to learn more about how national SEO can help them, even if they’re targeting their immediate region or province; and that’s what this webpage is all about.
Basic Purpose
National SEO is used to improve websites’ visibility on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. More extensive SEO campaigns are most appropriate for large-scale businesses with many offices or storefronts spanning multiple provinces; where the customer’s location doesn’t matter. The idea is to generate brand awareness for franchises and national brands, and that requires using broader, non-localized keywords.
Instead of focusing on geographically specific queries and long-tail keywords, national SEO experts help their clients rank for more general terms. For example, while a contractor in Toronto might want to rank for a long-tail keyword like “roof repair in Toronto.” A nationally franchised construction firm would want to rank for the more general term “roof repair.”
The Challenges of National SEO
Ranking for broad keywords is difficult because business owners face far steeper competition. They’ll have to square up against big brand names and national chains, all of whom are trying to attract the same customers. All that extra competition calls for a robust, strategic plan which SERPs SEO offers.
Covering the Basics
The first step we will take toward improving your national SEO campaign is to perform an in-depth SEO audit. This involves taking a broad look at the website’s current level of SEO-friendliness and figuring out where there is room for improvement.
Every website needs a few basic things to be crawlable and easy to index on Google. Crawling refers to the process of using algorithms to determine a site’s relevance to the user’s search query. Indexing refers to the inclusion of a website in a search engine’s search engine result pages (SERPs).
Google and other search engines use complex algorithms to determine a website’s relevance. They crawl the web to search for relevant content and display it according to the results of these algorithms. If businesses want their sites to rise in the ranks, they need to make sure that their websites meet all the search engine’s requirements.
A necessary SEO audit will uncover problems with site indexing, crawlability, load times, content, and more. Fixing these underlying issues is only the beginning of building a site that will rank high on nation-wide queries. The right SEO agency will also help clients with everything from link building to monitoring trends, generating SEO-friendly content, and more.
Data Analysis
Google and other major search engines provide plenty of free statistical data that can make it easier to gauge user intent. Resources like Google Trends can be helpful to digital marketers who know what they’re doing when it comes to SEO. Most business owners have a hard time deciphering the results of their Google Trend searches by themselves, which is why it’s always a good idea to hire professional help. One of the toughest parts of National SEO is having your website rank in multiple cities even though you do not have a physical location there; here are some great tips about city pages SEO!
Link Building
One of the factors Google takes into account when ranking webpages is their websites’ sitemaps and structure. Also, sites with more internal links and trustworthy external links will perform better on the world wide web.
Authoritative external links are essential for all forms of SEO. They’re significant for national SEO campaigns as well. The nice thing about a National SEO campaign is we don’t need as careful where the backlinks are coming from. International backlinks are acceptable.
Having plenty of helpful, user-friendly and keyword optimized content is one of the first steps. SERPs SEO knows that getting those ideas out there is where most business owners begin to face serious challenges. That’s where off-page SEO, or link building, comes in.
Link building requires active outreach. SEO agencies must contact digital publishers, bloggers, journalists, and social media influencers to promote their clients’ websites.
Content Creation
Whether you’re looking to boost rankings for nationally franchised businesses, running online stores, or monetizing a blog with affiliate links, content plays a vital role in every site owner’s SEO strategy. Google is constantly changing its algorithms, so business owners need to remain up-to-date on these trends by incorporating user-friendly, interactive, and mobile-optimized content.
Every business should have a blog. This blog can be used to convey information about upcoming sales and promotions, but that shouldn’t be the only purpose it serves. Educating people about your products and services will also help your website’s authority.
Blogs can also be used to teach the site’s visitors about how to use products, reinforce the importance of the company’s services, and discuss industry-specific news. The key is to keep information relevant by gauging user intent and providing content that directly addresses it. Sharing your blog posts on your Google my Business listing and your social media profiles is also a great idea to maximize exposure.
Quality Content
It used to be the case that creating high-ranking content was a simple matter of incorporating the right keywords the right number of times. Keyword density isn’t as important in 2019. Google’s current algorithms prioritize quality writing over keyword content, and that’s a good thing.
Bloggers used to be forced to fit keywords into their content by any means necessary. Now, they can write naturally for actual human visitors and trust Google’s algorithms to understand the context of their articles.
Google’s current algorithms also prioritize more in-depth content. The average page length of Google’s top-ten results has been hovering around 1800 to 1900 words. As a result, modern SEO agencies have altered their strategies to focus on longer, more in-depth content.
Guest Blogs and Outreach
Even if a website’s content is ten times better than any of its competitors, all those articles won’t do business owners any good if no one ever sees them. That’s where guest blogs and outreach come in.
Guest posts are posts written by or on behalf of business owners but posted on other relevant websites. The same contractor who commissioned a blog about roof repair in Toronto for local SEO and roof repair for a national audience might want to write a guest post about the importance of maintaining residential roofs for a lifestyle blog that targets modern homeowners, to revisit the example used above.
At the end of the blog post, the contractor would include a link to his or her website. This gives the company a backlink that will look good to Googlebots while also offering an opportunity to reach out directly to potential clients.
Infographics are also great for generating backlinks, as are expert roundups. Both of these techniques date back to the early days of SEO, but both of them remain relevant today. Many sites enjoy linking to a perfectly designed infographic.
Again, even the best guest posts, infographics, and expert roundups aren’t going to generate backlinks by themselves. SEO experts know that outreach is everything. They have an extensive network of other industry professionals who can help them place relevant content where it will be visible to consumers and perfectly positioned to raise their client’s search engine rankings.
Creating Link Bait
Linkbait is content that has been optimized to be shareable. This kind of content must be fun, engaging, on-brand, and ideally interactive. Things like quizzes, interactive maps, and specialized calculators that target the audience’s interests all constitute link bait. It’s not just internet users, but also other site owners can benefit from sharing the content.
Not all linkbait is interactive. Shareable articles often incorporate humour or an element of surprise to generate an emotional response in readers. What’s great about this form of link building is that it creates genuine value as a matter of course, which benefits everyone involved.
Get Help Now
Optimizing a website to rank high on national queries poses some serious challenges. That’s why you need to work with a company that has plenty of experience working with online store owners, for-profit bloggers, national franchises, and other nationwide businesses to boost their search engine rankings.
We have all the tools, skills, and experience required to help you create a perfectly optimized website, building backlinks, and network with other industry insiders to ensure there is relevance and visibility of your site’s content. Browse our website to learn more about our comprehensive SEO services or give us a call today to set up a consultation. You’ll be glad you did.