Establishing your page rankings for SEO is a key strategy for online marketing, but did you know that you could be more specific with your SEO rankings? It’s true! While global SEO might drive more visitors to your website, you might want to focus on getting new customers from specific countries.
In this article, we will discuss the best ways that you can rank nationally for SEO by using geo-targeted keywords to help target customers in particular countries. Let’s discuss it!
What is National SEO?
You may already know what SEO is or “search engine optimization” is. In short, it is the process of optimizing your website for search engines. National SEO, on the other hand, is the process of optimizing your website or online content for a country’s SEO rankings.
That is to say that the internet is not the same from country to country. In fact, Google in particular is highly optimized from place to place. In a way, you can think of national SEO as local SEO.
Have you ever noticed that when you are traveling, and you make a Google search that local businesses are suggested? National SEO is local SEO but with the intention of reaching that broader audience rather than the super specific audience of a local town.
But how do you know what keywords to use if you’re trying to get online traffic from a specific country? The answer is keyword research.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of researching keywords and their search rates on the internet. Many people are intimidated by the prospect of keyword research, but it is actually surprisingly simple. There are many tools that exist online that can help to expedite or even automate your process of adding keywords to your content.
Researching your keywords can be a handy process to add to your everyday SEO strategy, but it is imperative for ranking nationally for SEO.
This research can be performed by looking at Google Trends or using a keyword research tool such as Semrush. Either way, you decide to do your keyword research you should ensure that your keywords are relevant to your brand and have a high search volume in the country that you are hoping to reach.
Remember that there are two steps to keyword research: finding keywords and analyzing them. First, finding keywords should entail finding keywords that pertain to your brand and your business. Second, make sure that those keywords are strong keywords for the country that you want to gain visitors from.
So, now that you know how to research keywords, how do you implement your keywords into your web content?
How Can You Use Keyword Research to Optimize Your Website?
If you are going to bother with investing the time into optimizing your website and your content, you should know if your efforts are going to pay off. Knowing how to properly optimize your website is an equally important step in the process of SEO.
Many people have the instinct to shove as many keywords as they possibly can into their web content and see if they can snag people that way. However, search engines have caught onto this strategy, and they realize that this practice (known as keyword stuffing) is contributing to a degradation in quality of content on the internet.
Now, those that keyword stuff face penalties in their SEO ranking. Instead, your strategy for implementing your keywords into your website should be to use keywords sparingly and with intention.
For example, if your business is selling American-made products, you should absolutely mention this to try to improve your SEO with the United States. However, you should not parrot this fact in every sentence or in every part of your website navigation.
Instead, keep your keyword usage natural and ensure that you use them in important parts of your website, such as your landing page and your navigation.
You might also want to add more content to your website in order to rank nationally for SEO. Let’s discuss one of the ways that you might be able to easily boost your rankings.
How Can You Use Content to Rank Nationally for SEO?
Adding other forms of web-based content might just need the push that you need to involve more relevant keywords to your website for SEO ranking. A common SEO strategy that may help you rank nationally is to add a blog to your website.
Involving more written content on your site will allow you to use more keywords more frequently without falling into the trap of keyword stuffing. Instead, you will be engaging in another behavior that people commonly forget about with SEO.
Google actually rewards websites that provide content that is deemed useful. By providing helpful content to your visitors on your website, you will see an overall improvement in your SEO rankings, which will help your national rankings if you are using national keywords.
These blogs should be relevant to your industry and focus on key questions that your customers might have. If you run a business that involves shoes and fashion, you might want to discuss key trends in the industry or the best materials for clothing. The topics should be adjacent to your brand so that you can rank for your own relevant keywords.
As well, you will likely find more customers on your website who have arrived to have one of their pressing questions answered. You can use your blog posts as an opportunity to market your products as well.
Conclusion
To conclude, ranking nationally for search engine results is all about knowing that you are using the right keywords and using them properly. As long as you are engaging in proper SEO practices with keywords that are ranking high in the country you are trying to gain traffic from, you should see success!
We hope that you have found this brief guide to national keyword ranking helpful! Let us know in the comments if you have any further questions.
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