SEO has come a long way from being BackRub, a project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The project quickly became Google – a search engine that rewards high-quality and relevant content. Everything else is history. Over the years, SEO practices have changed. However, the goal remains the same – increase the quality and quantity of organic website traffic.
The SEO evolution gave us different types of optimization, including Organic SEO, Local SEO, National SEO, and Organic Local SEO. If you are interested in SEO, whether from a personal or business perspective, knowing the different types can help you make the right decision.
Organic SEO
Organic SEO encompasses organic search engine optimization processes. The term organic means that this type of SEO doesn’t leverage paid service. Organic SEO encompasses practices that are not based on PPC, whether it is PPC marketing on search engines or social media platforms.
Organic SEO helps businesses position better in the online landscape. As of March 2020, there were over 4.5 billion people online, making the internet the most opportunity marketing platform. Organic SEO is a long term marketing effort that enables the business to appear in their target customer searches.
To start with organic SEO, you have to understand the wants and needs of your target customers. It will help you generate the initial list of keywords you can research. Google search suggestions can help you streamline this process. For instance, if you want to rank for Organic SEO, the initial search would look something like the image below.
Once you have the list of keywords and key phrases, it’s time to take a deep dive into keyword research. The tricky part is to find a keyword with a high monthly volume of searches and low keyword difficulty. Then follows a long game – incorporating the keywords in your website copy and publishing relevant and high-quality content around those keywords regularly.
As you might’ve guessed, the organic SEO results take time. It can be months and subtle keyword refinements before you see an increase in organic traffic and your site climbing the SERP ranks.
Local SEO
Unlike organic SEO, which can help you rank your website better in general, local SEO will help your site appear in relevant local searches. For instance, if you are looking for an SEO expert, you can add a location to your search. The local SEO specialist in Denver query search results will be completely different from those that follow the local SEO specialist in New York query.
What happened there? Google is getting smarter every day. Optimizing your website for local queries means a lot, as more people are looking for local and nearby businesses and shops. Google takes into account the distance from user to business, the domain authority of a website, and its content relevance.
Local SEO encompasses various strategies to help websites boost visibility and findability. These strategies range from Google my Business page profile setup to keyword analysis and research. Including a location map and basic contact information on the website is also one of the typical local SEO practices, as seen in the picture below.
National SEO
National SEO lands pretty close to local SEO, but there are few things that make it different. It’s best suited for businesses that decide to go national. It means that the business will be operating in different areas and competing against other national companies and local businesses.
National SEO has two main goals: improve brand visibility on a national scale and boost a brand’s ranking in search results nationwide. The focus is here on the brand name and the products and services. More importantly, National SEO focuses on broad keywords.
Customers with high purchasing intent often use broad keywords. That’s the main reason why most broad keywords with high traffic volume also have a high keyword difficulty. Ranking for these keywords takes time, effort, and strategic approach.
Creating and publishing content on the official website takes a new form as you introduce city pages to target geographical areas in your country. Here is how bed bug lawyer city pages appear in search results:
Also, national SEO almost always leverages white hat backlinks – or so-called off-page SEO. Outreaching and guest posting are the two very important cogs in the national SEO machine. It requires a lot of effort and a lot of time, but that’s exactly what it takes to appear among the top results in the SERPS for targeted keywords nationwide.
Organic Local SEO
While local SEO focuses on practices to help Google figure out that a business close to a searcher via maps, pins, NAP, and Google My Business, Organic local SEO is a bit different – it focuses more on topical relevance coverage. The goal, however, remains the same – rank high in local searches. How does organic local SEO achieve it?
Topical relevance coverage refers to content found on websites. Most businesses that focus on organic local SEO leverage landing pages and their blog sections to publish content relevant to their target customers nearby. The content is created around the relevant keywords that contain the name of a city or area.
The title, header, and meta tags contain keywords on these key areas, thus enabling Google to render the site more relevant to local searches. Being organic means that this type of SEO doesn’t leverage PPC marketing to appear in front of local customers on social media or search engines.
Organic local SEO can help businesses cut through the local noise and reach out to customers who are looking for products or services without specifying a location in their query. If you happen to look for electrical services in Atlanta without specifying your location, you will get the list of contractors near you.
As you can see, SEO is a vast field, and starting SEO on a new website can be challenging. It encompasses various practices custom-tailored to achieve different goals. The set of SEO practices and goals are two things that make each of the SEO types unique.
Since increasing online visibility and generating high-quality organic traffic remains one of the primary business goals, many businesses combine different types of SEO to achieve it.