Things to Know About Regional SEO (Part 1)

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There are some businesses that prefer to rank for a bigger region instead of optimizing for a specific location. This is more practical because they give services in different areas and may not be able to have actual customers visiting the store.

Performing a well-planned regional SEO approach can assist broaden the many times your content is shown and the number of users that read your content devoid of straining your bank account to finance physical offices in a small city in the region. If you do this the right way, you can definitely rank in the SERP for the desired “near me” searches which are the usual places to get suggestions.

man standing in front of people sitting beside table with laptop computers

What is the distinction between Regional SEO and Local SEO?

There is a crucial distinction. Brian Harnish said, “Local SEO is a strategic process that focuses on emphasizing the optimization efforts of local brick-and-mortar businesses.”

  • A lot of physical stores, also called service area businesses, try to perform local SEO and put up a virtual office which also need its own set of employees. However, it’s basically operating via the internet. This is done to boost the online presence in the local SERP.
  • This is permissible by Google’s guidelines for as long as there are people doing the job during business hours. However, if a user complains and Google thinks that you are defying the law, then Google could suspend your listing. Of course, you can always ask for a reinstatement but that certainly will take a long time. So, always make sure to follow Google’s guidelines.

How do you Improve your Regional SEO?

To avoid the downward surge of your online visibility despite your intense SEO efforts, here are 5 suggestions to improve your regional SEO approach.

  1. Investigate Your Area

  • It is always wise to know your area by means of investigating. Do your research before you do anything. Find out the cities that gets the most organic attention for your services or goods.
    • Do a Local Keyword Research
      • Do this comprehensibly and don’t forget to add geo modifiers, also called geo tag or geographic modifiers, to your keywords.
      • Differentiate this with the report of the Google Analytics. Find out if there are identical (or diverse) data. When you are done with your city list, try to position them starting from the highest to the lowest search.
    • Classify Your Cities
      • The next step is to classify them in lone regions so we could lessen the number of the regions pages as we go on.
      • An example would be, if you want to rank in Dallas in your SEO services, then aim for business districts like Frisco, Irving, and so on. Take note that Fort Worth is only less than 40 miles away from Dallas and it could be wise to put them in just one area. Perhaps, your Dallas, Fort Worth page can focus on most areas of North Texas.

  1. Maximize Doorway Pages

  • Google describes this as “sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries.”
  • Further described as a set of identical or dualistic pages and goes to the same destination and that could hurt the user’s experience. Building doorway pages is the latest thing that should stop. Funny thing is that there are times that they work. In 2017, John Mueller said during a Google Webmaster Hangout that a well thought of doorway pages is a great scheme if done the right way.

Now, you have an idea on how to improve your regional SEO. But wait, I have more for you coming up on the second part.

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