Forget Local Search, Go National!

I meet a lot of business owners that think of Google as a directory almost in the same sense as the old offline Yellow Pages and forget the whole world is available to them not just the little piece they inhabit and operate in.

Today was one example. I met a lovely fellow who wanted to have his site optimised for local search across multiple towns and cities in the UK. I guess if he had just wanted to be found say some place once i.e. X Y Services Bristol then fine but I educated him that he was missing a far bigger search i.e one at a national level i.e. XY Services UK or even just XY Services.

We did some quick analysis on traffic and I was able to prove a point by showing Google roughly had 20 searches in one particular large UK town for his particular service. For the same XY service nationally there had been 2500+ searches.

Now it could well be that local search converts higher but I said to the client he would be better off having national coverage seeing as he was capable of servicing that demand. It's too easy for good SEO's to optimise for companies looking to be found at a local level on Google. If your SEO is any good he/she will do that AND get you ranked for searches nationally too.

I wondered if his other SEO company had provided him with the figures on local search, they had not and price wise we were both in the same ball park. Thing is they were prepared to charge money for a SEO service they could have provided at a far lower cost.

I'm just pleased I like working in a challenging SEO environment (i.e national) at a competitive rate rather then turning out no better than doorway local pages at extortionate rates!