Even today, plenty of local SEO services in Montreal or whichever city you’re looking to acquire help in still need to explain how their services can benefit local business. Sure, many small business owners can immediately understand the concept, but others still have some difficulty in distinguishing local SEO from “regular” organic SEO.
It is true that both local SEO and traditional organic SEO can benefit your business significantly. They can increase the number of people who know more about your brand, and they allow search engine users to know more about what you’re selling and providing.
But they’re very different from one another too. So, to simplify matters, here are some of their key differences:
Focus: Website vs. Physical Location
In organic SEO, the main focus is on promoting your website on the search engine. When a Google user wants to find the type of business you have, you want your website to be listed among the top results.
Since the focus is on the website, you don’t even need a physical location to run your business. Maybe you have a blog and you recommend items on your website for your customers to buy. When they buy the stuff you recommend, you get a percentage of the sale.
Or perhaps you run a delivery service from your garage, or you’re the middleman for a manufacturing company. Whatever it is, you don’t focus on the physical location. Your website is what matters.
But with local SEO, your physical location is actually the part that’s the main focus. In fact, you can have local SEO even though your business doesn’t have a website of its own! So, if you’re running a restaurant, your local SEO’s main goal is to tell Google users the name of your restaurant, and the location of your shop in your city and neighborhood.
Of course, additional data can also be provided. Local SEO can list your business phone number, your working hours, and the type of cuisine you offer. Local SEO can also provide potential customers with reviews regarding your restaurant.
Potential Beneficiaries
Now that we’ve identified the focus, we can now see what kind of businesses will need traditional SEO and which will require local SEO.
Traditional SEO is necessary for any website. It’s a given. Whether you have a physical location or not, if you have a website then you’ll want potential customers to find it, and that can be done with regular organic SEO. This is especially crucial for businesses without a physical location.
Local SEO, on the other hand, is required for businesses with a physical location that are tied to a specific area or city. With local SEO, it’s like you have a billboard for Google users to find so that they know your business exists, and they can find your physical location more easily. In most cases, people can even find your physical location on a map.
So, the most common beneficiaries of local SEO are businesses that are tied to a particular location, such as:
- Restaurants. Your business can be listed among “restaurants in Chicago,” “cafés in Brooklyn,” “best delis in Texas,” or “best clubs in the west coast.”
- Shops. Plenty of businesses sell items on shops, and of course you need customers to know about what you’re selling and where your shop is located. So, you can be listed among “office supplies shops in Oakland,” “teenage girls’ accessories shops in Oklahoma,” or “bespoke suits in London.”
- Service providers. You can be a plumber, an appliance repairman, an electrician, or a roofer. You can define the area you cover, and then offer your office number.
It is also possible that you will have need for both traditional SEO and local SEO. If you’re selling from your website and from your physical store, you really need both!
