Local vs International SEO – What’s Best For Your Business

A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is perhaps one of the most important aspects an online business must look into while creating their website. You need a robust SEO strategy for your business’ website to show up on search engines. The higher your website ranks, the more visibility it gets. Missing out on forming an SEO strategy for your website puts you at the risk of being left out and losing a substantial number of potential customers on the internet. Most online experiences today begin from a search engine. Google is the go-to search engine for people starting their user journey on the internet. The importance of ranking on these search engines through SEO, in this age, cannot be understated. Keep reading as we look into the two major types of SEO strategies that you can employ for your brand and decide which one works best.

What is SEO?

Going by the textbook definition, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of organic website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. Quality Traffic in the definition alludes to users that search for keywords from your website looking for products or services you offer. Organic Website Traffic refers to people that show up on your website by deliberately clicking on it from their search engines. Both quality and organic traffic is important for your website as real people looking for what you offer are the ones that bring you real business. The strategy to attract these people by ranking up higher on their search results is what constitutes the SEO strategy every brand nowadays looks into. SEO Strategies can be further divided into two broad categories:

What is Local and International SEO?

The definitions and the distinctions of the Local and International SEO are self-explanatory. As in, Local SEO refers to targeting users from the local search and International SEO refers to targeting people all over the internet. The fundamental elements of SEO remain the same in both the types. They both aim to improve your website’s content by using specific keywords. The only difference between the two is the market those keyboards aim to target. 

While the difference between the Local and International SEO may not be too big, a simple mistake of choosing the incorrect strategy can prove harmful for your business. To make this point even more clear for you, let’s take a look at some of the features of Local and International SEOs to figure out the appropriate occasion to use them. 

When Should I Use Local SEO?

The Local SEO is more suited to businesses that are operating in smaller markets. The keywords and content used in Local SEO needs to be very specific as it caters to a very niche audience limited to a small location on the map. Brands are encouraged to use their contact details, address and services offered to narrow down the scope of people that may land on their website.

Take for instance, a spa that operates in a single city in Australia. Targeting customers in their city becomes their best bet to attract more people to their website and eventually, their business. Going for Local SEO, in cases like this one, becomes essential for the business to prosper. 

When Should I Use International SEO?

As the name suggests, International SEO is used by brands that operate across borders, be it cities, countries or even continents. Today, large websites that offer products and services throughout the globe are spending big money to devise the best International SEO strategy for their websites. 

As opposed to Local SEO, the content published here needs to be relevant and appealing to a huge number of people as it is visible to people from different regions and cultures. It should have something for every kind of customer that may land on your website through the specific keywords used by you. International SEO hence is more effort and time consuming than Local SEO. 

To combat this problem, several major brands now even have websites for specific regions for their brand making it easier for their marketing teams to curate content. This allows the brand to maintain different identities that can suit the preferences of different regions, cultures or demographics throughout the globe while maintaining their uniformity. 

So What SEO Strategy Should I Use?

The answer to this question mainly boils down to the ambitions and the scale that your brand may have. As explained above with the spa example, using International SEO for a business operating locally would be a bad strategy. Similarly, a Local SEO strategy for a business involved in cross border trade would cost them millions of potential customers as they may not be able to reach them through their search engines. 

Therefore, before implementing an SEO strategy for your brand, you need to determine the scale your business operates, or would want to operate in along with the location they want to limit (or expand) themselves into. Only then you can arrive at an SEO strategy that brings your brand positive results.