With your business expanding to a bigger audience, you might notice that your old marketing plan isn't working anymore. You aren't popping up in search engines at the national level. Your business website isn't able to get out there and reach more people. You've outgrown your local SEO strategy and you want to launch your local business to new heights!
In this article, we will talk about how to revamp your business model and how to rank nationally using National SEO. We'll cover the basics: What is National SEO, what are national rankings, and how to make your own National SEO campaign.
What Is National Search Engine Optimization?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In layman’s terms, it is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility when potential customers use search engines to find a service. In this digital age, more people are using search engines to find things they want to know. By making your ranking in the search engines high, you get a bigger chance of getting the attention of potential customers and remind existing customers about you. This can range from local to national SEO strategies.
Local SEO is all about ranking high in your local area. Think of it as the starting point of all local businesses trying to find their target audience. Local traffic is diverted from your website to go to your brick-and-mortar boutique. This can work well if you are trying to get your local business off the ground. These are usually focused on a small physical location to help when doing a local web search in that area.
National SEO, on the other hand, is about getting potential customers from multiple cities or the entire country and ranking nationally. A national SEO strategy isn't just expanding a Local SEO strategy. National SEO strategies are more nuanced, which means thinking about strategies that go beyond your current physical location. The key difference is that National SEO needs to have a wider appeal but still hit the same customers as before. It needs to have a wider range of new options such as a vastly diverse product line, bigger marketing push and a new twist to generate website traffic.
Due to this, local businesses are at a disadvantage if they aren't able to see the difference and pivot their local SEO to National SEO when expanding to hit a bigger target audience.
The usual path is that your business grows big enough that it needs to pivot from Local SEO to National SEO. This means stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of how you want your brand to be known at a national level.
The main point of doing all these is to rank nationally. Rankings in SEO refers to a website's position in the search engine results page. The higher the rank, the bigger the chances that your site is the first to be clicked on by potential customers.
You might have noticed how people tend to not go through the entire list of search results. We focus on the highest ranked results for our needs. With that in mind, ranking nationally can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic your site can get.
How to Rank Nationally With Your Strategy
The main thing that we all want in a National SEO campaign is for it to generate a bigger audience for your company, thus increasing your brand awareness via search engines and revenue.
If your local company is trying to grow, this means operating a multi-location business website and expanding your e-commerce store to accommodate major cities. Local SEO can only take you so far before things slow down. National brands spend millions of dollars in digital marketing and content marketing just to create national SEO campaigns to create effective national SEO campaigns.
Please keep in mind that your SEO efforts won't bear fruit overnight. A good SEO company that is working on your national SEO strategy is looking at it as a multi-stage process in which we build up your company. Rushing forward in national SEO can hinder your growth.
To help you out, we've listed the things you need to create an effective campaign for National SEO:
1. Understand Your End Goal for National SEO
Having a vague idea of what your end goal for national SEO is a clear sign of it needing more time on the drawing board. Think of it this way: would you follow a general to battle if he had a vague plan of how to win?
To rank nationally, you need to know exactly what you want. Getting those national rankings isn't easy and you will have tough moments. By mapping out exactly what you want to gain when pivoting from Local SEO to National SEO, you are giving yourself a map to follow when the going gets tough.
Talk to your SEO company and ask what Local SEO vs National SEO looks like. National SEO campaigns aren't cut from the same cloth. Each one has to be crafted specifically for your local business to maximize SEO success.
Asking questions about how your National SEO plan can fail will allow you to find ways to prevent them. These are hard questions to ask but you need to be prepared to handle all of these once the ball is rolling. This is your business name on the line and you want to go in there with a clear plan.
2. Conduct a National Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding all possible search queries that may be relevant to your business. This can be about using your search engine and keyword research tools to curate the relevance of each keyword to your business.
By doing so, you will get a better idea of what your national brand identity might be and tailor your business to it. Knowing the user intent behind every search term can really boost how you plan out your strategy.
When trying to get on top of the local rankings, your focus was on attracting local customers with local citations and being seen as an establishment in your local area. For national SEO, you would need to use broad keywords in your keyword research to find what is trending in Google Analytics at a national level.
3. Upgrade Your Website Structure
Your site structure can play an integral part in your National SEO success. A local business can have a website with a good web design but as you grow, you would need to upgrade it to handle the growing organic traffic you will be getting.
This means creating an SEO-friendly website that is also mobile-friendly. This small accommodation can really change how your business can go as most people use their phones for searching as well as checking out your online store.
You also need to make sure your website address is easy to remember and remove any dead links that can affect the customer experience. Web design is all about making things easier for the customer to navigate your website and being able to access services from multiple cities.
To better check your website, you can use Google Search Console - a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results.
By doing so, you will have a better insight on how your site is performing as well as making sure it keeps on performing well. Utilizing these SEO tools can really be a game changer when dealing with National SEO rankings.
4. Optimize Your Google My Business Account
In this digital age, a Google My Business (GMB) account is integral to launch small businesses to national brands. It is now an essential part of your online reputation to get your business name out there so that customers can see exactly how people see your business through reviews and when doing keyword research.
GMB accounts also allow you to directly submit your business information to Google so it shows up in Google search results, thus making it easier for people to find you as you will now appear in Google Maps.
5. Curate Your Online Reputation
A reputation can make or break a national SEO strategy. To create a positive brand reputation, you need to be able to accurately control the narrative of what your company represents. This is all about optics and how you want to be seen by your new audience at a national level.
This means curating what you say on your company website. A blog post containing your in-depth content, mission, vision, and goals can really help people understand what you want to do.
A good SEO company will try to work with your old company image and expand it using their SEO tools, link building, and keyword research to find possible connections to your branding.
6. Create Compounding Content
Once you have your product ready, you need to be able to create content to drive organic traffic to your site. Compounding content is the practice of creating content that can be broken down into smaller content for different types of media.
By doing so, you are effectively cutting down costs to create content as well as minimizing the time needed to create it.
A national SEO company does this by breaking down its products/services and creating content marketing around it. This can be in the form of a blog post, a video or even a PDF freebie.
By having a constant stream of content to work with, you are helping create brand awareness as well as show off what you offer. Representing yourself with your best foot forward can really boost your ranking nationally.
7. Link Building
Link building is a search engine optimization technique that increases your search engine ranking. Links really help with your google analytics by showing your content is valuable. The more links you have, the better you will appear in the search engine when conducting keyword research.
Doing this nationally is about targeting national publications and web pages to raise your domain authority. You also need to pinpoint national company sites that are specific to your business that have a national reach to be able to promote your business. Link building is all about making your site as searchable as possible when using the relevant terms in a search engine.
Innovation in Marketing
After reading all the steps on how to rank nationally, you might be wondering if this is worth the effort. You might just be having a rough patch and your business might pick up again despite using only Local SEO.
The answer to that is simple: Innovation.
For the longest time, print marketing has been the cornerstone of our industry. Want to get your product out there? You buy a spot in the local newspaper advertising your new business. You tell people to spread the word about your new product. This was the standard until the internet made its way to us. From there, people use their phones to do a local search for services they need.
As soon as it hit, people started trying to figure out how to use it to sell and market to a wider audience. This changed the game in marketing. If you want a bigger slice of the pie, you need to work harder for it. Expanding to multiple cities is now common for a company to grow.
The goal is for you to be able to stand out in this highly competitive because even if you don't change your Local SEO, the competition will. Once they do, you will need to pick up the pace just to get to their level. By moving to National SEO, you will be able to reach potential customers with high-quality content and services.
So by planning accordingly, you will still be able to take parts of your local SEO strategy and apply it to a national or even global level. Just because your local SEO campaign won't work forever as you grow doesn't mean you can't use some of it for your new national SEO campaign. By pivoting from Local SEO to National SEO, you are opening your company to more potential customers and growth.
What NOT To Do When Wanting to Rank Nationally
Now that you know what to do to rank high in National SEO, we need to talk about the biggest problem when trying to do it. This is RUSHING.
Growth is all about the time and circumstances you see yourself in. By attempting to grow at a fast rate with your National SEO without factoring in possible traps ahead, you risk losing the business altogether. A lot of local companies upon hearing about national SEO would rush to get into the action, without knowing that this is a process, not a race. They rush to get the keyword research done, make a mobile-friendly site, revamp their site structure and do link building without checking if the SEO efforts they are putting in will actually work.
To make the most of SEO nationally, you need to put the time and effort to do the work. A rush job is a sloppy job. Before you send anything out to the wider SEO community, you need to be sure that you can stake your business name on that National SEO. Because a bad launch can really affect your business in the long haul.
Expand Your National SEO Strategy With the help of LeaseMyMarketing
Changing your Local SEO strategies to National SEO strategies has never been this easy with LeaseMyMarketing. We've studied how national and local SEO work. We have the SEO tools to help you pivot your business and get it ready for a national audience. You don’t need to do your national SEO campaign alone! Contact us today for a free quote.