Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the free range, gourmet feed shop that he found after searching “corn store in pigeon forge” in Google on his iPhone and clicking on a localized organic result. If you liked that joke, you’ll love this less than smooth transition into my topic of why local search requires the helping hand of national SEO.
Because we work with a large number of multi-unit and franchise clients, I’ve been asked to talk about specific services just for local SEO. In trying to process why I had a bad taste in my mouth at the thought of launching a purely local SEO campaign, I found that I needed a visual to illustrate what I was thinking.
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A national SEO campaign for a franchise or multi-unit business typically focuses efforts on priority industry keywords and long tail phrases. The optimization across existing web pages, new content development and a backlink strategy will utilize variations of these targeted keywords to achieve search result visibility, thereby driving more site traffic and sales. This is a VERY simplified overview, but we’ll keep it for the sake of time. Well what if your products or services are so localized that you just don’t see the value in putting time and money into the national portion of the site?
The reason is that domain and page authority, built up from backlinks, optimizations, site traffic and a hundred other factors, is passed down to the local pages through the navigation and other effectively placed internal links from the homepages and strong sub-pages. By having some centralized link and content efforts (which coincidentally is a lot more manageable at the national level) you are still passing that value down to elevate the local pages in localized results. If all your focus is only on local, those individual pages won’t have the benefit of a strong domain pushing them up. In addition you’ll find yourself spread thin, especially if there are hundreds or thousands of locations. Unless you have a massive budget and/or SEO team, you won’t be able to deliver effective SEO across all locations, so having that national campaign will make sure that all are benefiting.
