What are the differences between local SEO and global SEO? Full Guide

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1. Local SEO

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the optimization of your online properties so you can be found in localized searches. By using the resources and strategies in this guide, you can ensure that your business will be found when your target customers search online.

When we talk about local SEO, we’re talking about any types of searches that are being localized. The strategies in this guide affect LOTs of different areas of search, so let’s take a look at some of the places that you’ll want to show up.

Local SEO OnPage Optimization

Optimizing your pages are important in order to rank for the keywords your target audience is looking for.

We discuss this a bit in our article on local keyword research.

There are a few major things you’ll want to make sure you do in order to rank your website locally.

1. Set Up Your Website Structure To Rank Landing Pages

If you serve multiple cities, you can create city specific landing pages for each city. This is a common workaround for a business that only has 1 location, or does not have an office, but serves an entire area.

For instance, you may set up your website to have multiple landing pages for each area that you serve:

yourwebsite.com/suburb-1/
yourwebsite.com/suburb-2/
yourwebsite.com/suburb-3/

This will allow you to rank organically in places where you may not have a physical office!

2. Optimize Your Title Tags, Meta Description, Headers, and Content

All normal OnPage optimization elements apply here. You’ll want to include your city as well as your keywords in the title tag and on the page.

3. Display Your NAP In Schema Format On Your Website

Make sure you display your name, address, and phone number combination on your website, and preferably in schema format.

Make sure that this NAP is consistent with your business listings.

P.S. Don’t forget to put your business hours!

4. Embed a Google Map

It’s a great idea to embed a Google map to your location so that users can easily find it.

6. Include Clear Calls To Action

Not only do you want people to visit your website, you want them to convert! Make sure that your phone number is clearly and prominently displayed and there are easy ways to contact you. Guide the user and use CTAs to tell them what to do next (call you, request a quote, etc).

7. Include Reviews & Testimonials

Displaying reviews on your site will help improve conversions, giving users confidence in your service.

8. Make it Mobile Friendly

Google has a large focus on mobile-friendly websites and we saw the start of this with Mobilegeddon in 2015. You’ll want to use Google’s mobile-friendly test to make sure your website displays correctly on mobile devices.

If your website doesn’t pass the test, you should consider a website re-design or update your WordPress theme.

2. Global SEO

What Is Global SEO?

A Global SEO effort focuses on your website and uses a number of techniques that help search engines index it in such a way that the site appears on search engine results pages for specific keywords.

1. Implement geo-specific schema tags

The second set of HTML tags is the geo-specific Schema.org tags. For those unfamiliar, Schema.org provides a collection of tags that webmasters can use to mark up certain content elements with structured data that Google, Yahoo, and Bing all recognize and use to better understand the intent of the content. 

2. Create webmaster accounts for each country

Google Webmaster Tools provides in-depth information into many different elements of your website and allows you to control certain aspects around how Google indexes your content; in particular, the ability to set up geo-targeting by country. A webmaster account should be set up for each country site regardless of whether the content is located in subdirectories, on subdomains, or on a ccTLD.

3. Engage in local link building

Link building, whether through traditional efforts such as outreach programs or guest blogging, social media, and leveraging partnerships, will always be one of the strongest ways to obtain more favorable rankings. In addition to helping with rankings, the search engines will look at the origin of the links to help determine local relevance.

4. Utilize multilingual markup tags

There are several multilingual-specific HTML tags that should be leveraged across each of your country sites. The first is the href lang tag. Search Engine Watch has an article explaining how and when to use this tag.

5. Set up Google Places listings

In addition to leveraging the Schema.org tags to associate your content with the right countries, if you have brick-and-mortar locations, you should submit their information to Google Places and claim ownership of the listings. Places pages can be optimized using traditional SEO techniques to help them appear in organic listings and can also be used to funnel traffic back to your main site through backlinks.