What is the Difference between SEO and Local SEO – Vancouver area SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very broad term that people use in many different ways – some more…accurate than others. It can get even more complicated when we drill down further to defining the difference between organic SEO and Local SEO, as they have very different goals and outcomes. Let’s look at the differences between the two, and Van Island Web’s approach to both.

What’s the Difference Between Organic SEO and Local SEO

Let’s start with defining organic and local SEO.

  • Organic SEO is the practice of optimizing your website and building your websites online profile to rise in search engine ranking – particularly Google search rankings.
  • Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your business or website to show up in local SERP (Search Engine Results Page) results for business listings and in local map packs.

While both of these SEO practices are important for your business, they have very different approaches and very different outcomes.

Organic SEO – Outcomes and Van Island Web’s Approach

As a business, the main goal of organic SEO is to drive visitors to your businesses website to sell services, products, and gain business leads. Search engine users tend to trust the top, non-sponsored results that Google provides to them, and the way to get there is organic SEO.

There is no black and white, set in stone approach to how to do organic SEO. Search engine companies keep their algorithms and search result mechanics a secret, and combine hundreds of variables to rank your site. These algorithms are constantly shifting and evolving, so it can be hard to pin down what SEO practices have the greatest effect on your search result rankings.

But that’s not to say there aren’t some tried, tested and trusted pillars of SEO that have proven to show positive results in business search results. Tweaking and monitoring your SEO campaign will always be necessity, but following a few key approaches will show you SEO success.

Tracking Organic SEO success

How do you track success of an organic SEO campaign? At Van Island Web, success is measured by tracking your website’s SERP rankings over time for specifically defined valuable search keywords. It may take time to see the SEO results that you want (4 to 6 months), but by tracking the SERP ranks, you can see the progress your website is making.

Van Island Web Organic SEO approach

Van Island Web follows SEO pillars to ensure that we provide the results that you are looking for.

  1. SEO Keyword Research. To be able to define success, we need to understand which keywords are the most valuable to rank for your website. We research keywords that have appropriate search difficulty, have proper search intent and enough search volume to be effective at gaining business through your website.
  2. Checking for penalties. If your website has already been penalized or flagged by Google’s search algorithm, that needs to be the first step to be addressed before your website can start ranking. No amount of search engine optimization is going to help your business if your website already has a penalty.
  3. Building relevancy for target keywords. Search engines need to see your website as a relevant source of information for whatever a user is searching. If your content isn’t seen as relevant by Google, then you are never going to rank.
  4. Building site authority. Google needs to see your website as a source of authority on the internet if you want your site to place high in their rankings. Building authority for your website is done in multiple ways, but the most important factor in building authority is to build backlinks from trusted, authoritative websites.

There are many different methods and actions to be taken for each of the four pillars, but everything we do can be attributed to one of those items. For a more detailed account of Van Island Web’s SEO practices, get in touch with us and we’d be happy to setup a consultation meeting.

Local SEO – Outcomes and Van Island Web’s Approach

While organic and local SEO are tied together, they have different goals, outcomes and approaches. As a business, the main goal of local SEO is to show up at the top of business listings and map pack results when someone local searches for a relevant service or business offering.

Tracking Local SEO success

Much like organic SEO, tracking where your website ranks in local map pack results is key to measuring success. Unfortunately, this can be a little more difficult to measure as the search results rankings are dependent on where a person is geographically conducting their search from.

We use heatmap tools to be able to measure the success of your local SEO campaign. These tools create a heatmap around where your local business is found, to show where you rank in the local area’s business rankings:

Local SEO Map Rank Tracking

With local SEO heatmap tools, we can track rankings (and success) based on the area of searchers around your business.

Van Island Web Local SEO Approach

Van Island Web’s local SEO approach focuses on building, enhancing and managing your Google My Business (GMB) profile. Your GMB is the hub of your local business listing, and has many aspects to be optimized to help your business show up in local search results. We focus our local SEO approach on the following:

  1. Creating a GMB profile for your business. This is the hub for your local SEO practices.
  2. Optimizing your GMB profile. This profile needs to center on your services and the user search intent based on your business offerings.
  3. Gathering and gaining Google Reviews for your business. Getting the appropriate amount of Google Reviews is essential to ranking higher in Google map packs.
  4. Providing up-to-date GMB information and postings. Your business profile needs to stay fresh and relevant. Random Google users can make suggestions and edits to your GMB profile, so you need to constantly check to ensure that it stays accurate.
  5. Building local citations. Citations are places that mention your name, address, and phone number online, such as business directories and social media profiles.
  6. Building site authority. As per our organic SEO practices, building authority for your businesses website help build your ranks in the search algorithm rankings.

Value in both organic and local SEO

While organic and local SEO tends to target different audience, both can be invaluable in driving traffic and leads to your businesses website.

  • Organic SEO – has a greater reach and targets users outside your local area.
  • Local SEO – has less reach than Organic SEO, but less competition as well. Local SEO allows you to reach users who are more engaged and looking for local businesses.

There is amazing value in optimizing your businesses online profile for both of these types of Search Engine Optimization.

Looking for Vancouver Area SEO services?

There is a large number of people and agencies who provide SEO services which can make finding an SEO agency feel like a daunting task. And unfortunately, they don’t all offer a high level of SEO service. Our recommendation is to make sure you have a full discussion with and vet anyone you are thinking of hiring to help ensure you are getting good SEO services. Some things to think about when researching agencies:

What to look for in an SEO agency

  • An agency that has a clear strategy. There should be a multi-pronged approach to their SEO, and the agency should be able to talk through each part of their approach.
  • An agency that provides transparency in their SEO practices. There shouldn’t be any “secret sauce” or any practices that the agency won’t tell you about, it should all be above board.

What to avoid when vetting an SEO agency

  • Any agency who guarantees you the top rankings in Google. SEO is fickle and while someone can promise positive movement, it’s impossible to guarantee that their SEO services will get your site to the number 1 spot in Google and stay there.
  • An agency looking to provide one-time SEO – SEO is a process and can’t be done in a week, no matter how much someone charges. Look for an agency that brings a long-term, natural growth-based strategy to building out your businesses online profile.
  • An agency that uses black-hat SEO (a form of search engine optimization where a website uses ill practices in order to artificially improve their rankings for search queries). While these may work in the short term, there is a good chance that it will hurt your SEO rankings in the long run with penalizations from Google.

How to get started with Van Island Web

If you’ve liked what you’ve read so far, and want to hear more about how Van Island Web can help your business rise in the search ranks, reach out to us at [email protected] or by phone at 250-544-2777.

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