National SEO

What is national SEO? It is understandable that you’re asking this question either before trying to implement it yourself or, looking for somebody for the job.

Here, we will let you in on what national SEO is and explain the difference between local SEO vs national SEO.

National SEO is the process of optimising your site for your country on a national level, meaning that you want to end up at the top of the SERP (search engine results page) for a holistic search term that isn’t tailed with a location.

For example, if you sell windows. A national keyword that you may optimise your website for is “Double glazed windows”, or “Double glazed windows UK”.

Since the end goal is to be able to reach the users all over the country that are searching for your relative keyword, it is important to know that your website must be optimised correctly to actually rank.

So how do you do this?

Below are some practices within SEO that should be considered when going forward with pushing your website up to the next level and implementing national SEO.

Keyword Research

If you know anything about SEO, we’re sure that you’ll know all about the importance of keyword research.

So what makes it so different when it comes to national SEO?

If you’re a small scale business, perhaps operating from within Manchester, chances are you have initially targeted the localised keywords. For instance; “best cafe in Manchester”. While this is a good keyword to target, what happens when you open a franchise in London perhaps?

Does this mean you’re now going to go for the keyword “Best cafe in London”? Or, are you going to understand that you have the potential to grow and start using national SEO to become the “best cafe in the UK”?

Something to consider is shifting your attention away from the location you’re in, and instead centralising around the business or service that you provide.

For example, rather than opting for something along the lines of “language tutor in London” you would instead, focus on the actual service, so it would be replaced with an example such as “Language tutor for Mandarin”.

As you can see, there is no limitation on the actual location of the keyword, instead it is a holistic keyword that refers to the service or product that your site is used for; this indeed takes more work, however the return is greater too.

So you can see what this might look like and why the return on national SEO is beneficial for your site below with an example of these two keyword examples.

With data pulled from Semrush on these two keywords, you’re able to find both the keyword difficulty (remember, this is how difficult it is to rank) and the search volume (the average amount of searches per month).

Looking at this example, it is clear that the volume is significantly higher for the national SEO keyword than it is for the localised one and while it is often a good starting point, it can be limiting your prospects of visibility and CTR.

However, you may also notice that typically with higher volume keywords, the competition increases and thus, the keyword difficulty also increases. Since this is the case for most national keywords, it would take more work on improving the overall health of the site.

This would include implementing SEO best practices everywhere on your site, like generating backlinks, keeping a consistent flow of content and the many other branches of SEO.

Your target audience should always be at the forefront of your mind when considering what direction to go in with your website, but this becomes even more imperative when you’re stepping up the ladder to national SEO.

One big change that you may find is the level of competition once you start to learn how to rank nationally, SEO then needs to be finer tuned and worthy of not just reaching your audience, but also competing with long standing ranking sites that are already in that 1-10 spot.

First, do your research. Find out who is there and ask yourself some simple questions to get the ball rolling like:

• What are they doing right?
• What are they missing?
• Who is their target audience?
• What keyword(s) are they ranking for?

An in-depth analysis should be conducted to find out how you would have the capacity to overtake them. You’re no longer competing against your neighbours down the street, you’re competing with national and possibly even international businesses all fighting for the top spot.

One other factor to consider before taking the leap of national SEO is how you’re going to combat the change in user experience.

Now that you know the answer to ‘what is national SEO?’, it wouldn’t be surprising if you feel a little overwhelmed. If so, not to worry, we are well equipped at Maxweb to help you make the move from local SEO to national.

Alternatively, if you’re jumping straight into the deep end, get started right away with national SEO implementation with our experienced team of SEO consultants and developers. To find out more about how we can help, click here for SEO UK.