If you are exploring ways to drive new and valuable traffic to your business website, then there is no doubt that you have at least heard of the term “SEO.” Simply put, SEO – or Search Engine Optimization – is a marketing strategy that uses content as a way to signal high value to search engines, therefore improving your ranking and capturing new traffic as your site gets more hits from the popular search engines for relevant terms. However, there are a few different types of SEO, and your strategy will need to be adjusted depending on the nature of your business, your goals, and more.
One important distinction that you will want to understand early into your planning process is the difference between a regular SEO campaign and a local campaign, which we will discuss below. For the best results, we recommend working with a local SEO company that can help you target your locale with a high rate of success so that you can reach your local customers and help them get easier access to your products and services.
What is SEO?
SEO is a strategy that focuses on increasing traffic to a website through organic search rankings, as opposed to pay-per-click search campaigns and other paid marketing efforts. In short, SEO is a highly effective way to improve both the quantity AND quality of your traffic by reaching users who are specifically searching for the terms and topics that you are an expert on, and will visit your site looking for your advice and help as they learn more about your industry.
In order to reach these new and valuable users, SEO involves writing useful and engaging content that your target audience will find helpful, such as blog posts, authority pages on your website, and guest posts on other sites that link back to your page. The major search engine crawlers will then recognize that you have a high volume of useful and relevant keywords for your industry and will begin to send more traffic in your direction. As these new users find the information they need on your site, your rankings will continue to improve, thus initiating an ongoing cycle of content creation and improved traffic.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is essentially the same tactic as regular SEO, except that instead of trying to cast a wide net across the entire internet, you will focus on capturing local traffic – for example, searchers who need a plumber in your county. As a plumber, your service range is limited to your physical location, so a plumber in Tuscon, AZ will not want to be targeting traffic in Alberta, Canada. Local SEO incorporates the fundamentals of a full SEO strategy, but takes the extra step to differentiate the location that you are serving and targeting.
When you work with an SEO company, they will help you develop a series of short-chain and long-chain keywords that include your target locations so that you can be sure that the traffic to your page is relevant, useful, and actionable.
