Building an Effective Regional SEO Strategy

In today’s digital age, it’s crucial for small brick and mortar businesses to be able to generate buzz online in order to increase foot traffic and sales.

One way to do this is through local SEO, which is the process of optimizing your website and online content to reach potential customers in specific geographic regions, usually ones within a certain mile radius from your physical location.

In this article, we’ll explore the steps you can take to build an effective regional SEO strategy that drives traffic, leads, and revenue to your business.

Understanding Regional SEO

Before diving into the specifics of building a regional SEO strategy, it’s important to understand what it is and how it works.

Regional SEO is the practice of optimizing your website and online content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for local searches.

This means targeting keywords that are relevant to your business and location, and ensuring that your website is optimized for the specific needs and interests of your local audience.

The terms regional SEO and local SEO can be interchangeable, however a purely local strategy may only address your immediate city or town, whereas regional has somewhat broader connotations. The defining factor of both, however, is that these strategies utilize search term modifiers and content that is specifically geared to generate foot traffic to certain locations or sales within a certain radius.

Can a national strategy work for a local business? It depends.

Very often, small businesses don’t have the budget or the resources to rank for highly competitive search terms. Most of the time, it wouldn’t make sense anyway because where smaller businesses shine is in their niche offerings, which don’t necessitate broader keywords.

There is always value in going after broader search terms in hopes of driving more traffic, but if you can only serve customers in store, or only mail products within a certain radius, things can get tricky when you try and drive national traffic.

So for smaller businesses it makes sense to go with a regional SEO strategy that is custom fit to drive local traffic. This way you can better target keywords that are relevant to your specific products and services, and ensure that the majority of the traffic you are getting is high-quality.

Getting Started With Your Regional SEO Plan

Conducting Regional Keyword Research

The first step in building an effective regional SEO strategy is to conduct the proper keyword research.

This involves identifying the search terms that your target audience is using to find businesses like yours in your local area or in a specific region.

Tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush can help you identify these keywords and analyze their search volume, competition, and relevance to your business.

As a business owner in your area, you are probably aware of where your competition ranks for certain keywords. It can be helpful to use Google itself as a keyword research tool, to take note of the positions your competition is in, the keywords that are featured in their meta titles, and also what questions pop up in the “People Also Ask” sections.

Optimizing Your Website

Once you’ve identified your target keywords, the next step is to optimize your website for regional SEO.

This includes ensuring that your website has a clear and consistent NAP (name, address, phone number) across all pages, creating location-specific landing pages for each of your business locations and primary products or services, and optimizing your website’s meta tags, titles, and descriptions with your target keywords.

Always keep in mind with SEO, whether it’s regional or national, the connection between the keywords you select and where they live on your website is of the utmost importance.

Google determines the relevance of site content and user action when determining if a page is worth ranking for a specific search term.

Any website can include any phrase or keyword, but that doesn’t mean it will rank.

For example, if you have a page on your website dedicated your bakery in Richmond, Virginia, the actual phrase needs to include keywords and content that signal to Google that this page is worth serving to searchers. You can start by making the title of the page something like “The Best Bakery in Richmond, Virginia,” and go from there.

Conversely if you sell products related to this industry, the keyword might look something like this: “The Best Baking Supplies in Richmond, Virginia.”

Obviously, the rest of the content on the page has to support this phrase, otherwise it will not have as much of an impact.

The keyword research phase is crucial, so take your time. This will underpin the rest of your regional SEO strategy going forward.

Creating Local Content

Speaking of content, it’s important to create local-themed content that resonates with your target audience. This can include blog posts, infographics, videos, and other types of content that highlight your business’s expertise and relevance to your local community.

By creating high-quality, regionally focused content, you can attract more traffic and backlinks to your website, which can improve your overall search engine rankings.

The key here again is relevance. When someone clicks onto your website, you want to capture their attention as long as possible.

No better way to do this than with quality content.

Think about putting together a content strategy as a part of your regional SEO plan. Blog posts that include information on local events, the impact you are making in your community, new product releases and sales, and other bits that your customers would care about.

Including the keywords you are trying to rank for in these pieces is essential. Never do anything on your website just for the sake of doing it, there should always be a purpose behind changes and additions.

Claiming Your Google My Business Listing

One of the most important steps in building a regional SEO strategy is claiming and optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) listing.

This is a free tool and resource provided by Google that allows you to manage your business’s online presence across Google Search and Maps. By claiming your GMB listing and ensuring that it’s complete and accurate, you can increase your visibility in local search results and improve your chances of attracting new customers.

While this isn’t true for all small businesses, many local establishments rely on Google Maps especially for foot traffic. Your GMB profile and how often you update it weighs heavily on whether or not you will appear high in the Google Maps results in your area, so make this a priority in your digital marketing strategy.

Building Local Citations

Another important aspect of regional SEO is building local citations. These are mentions of your business’s name, address, and phone number on other websites and directories, such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, and TripAdvisor.

By building local citations, you can improve your website’s authority and relevance in your local area, which can improve your search engine rankings and attract more local customers.

There are some websites that can help you get listed in local directories, but it’s not difficult to create them manually. If you are a legitimate business you can simply sign up on Yelp and similar websites and apply. There are hundreds of different business listing websites, however, so it makes sense to outsource this to an SEO agency that specializes in local strategies.

Monitoring Your Results

Finally, it’s important to monitor your regional SEO results regularly.

This involves tracking your website’s search engine rankings for your target keywords, analyzing your website’s traffic and engagement metrics, and monitoring your online reviews and reputation. By keeping a close eye on your regional SEO performance, you can identify areas for improvement and adjust your strategy accordingly.

It’s important to be able to recognize when something isn’t working so you can pivot if necessary. You also need to be able to monitor the phone calls and foot traffic you receive.

An increase in spam calls could be a sign that you are attracting low-quality traffic. If your foot traffic isn’t increasing despite improvements in keyword position, you could be targeting the wrong keywords.

Always pay attention to the results you are generating with any marketing strategy and be prepared to change course if things aren’t going the way you need them to go.

It’s Time to Dominate The Regional Searches

Now that you have a pretty clear picture on how to get started with regional SEO, I would recommend taking a look at some of our other resources on eCommerce SEO, such as this article on how to perform in depth keyword research.

Putting together a successful regional SEO campaign isn’t a light lift, but if you put in the work, you are sure to see the results. What’s great about a hypertargeted local approach is that many of the long-tail keywords associated with local searches aren’t as difficult to rank for as broader national terms.

This means that you’re never that far away from seeing meaningful results as long as you put in the effort.