Nationwide SEO can help to rank your business nationally on search engines. This is especially useful if your business deals all around the country.
There’s a lot of general technical SEO that applies across all websites. However, in order to SEO nationally — you must become the leader.
In this article, we’re going explain how to rank nationwide for your business’s keywords. Allowing you to have an understanding of how we perform national SEO audits by looking at:
- Nationwide keyword research
- Setting preferred languages
- Creating city-specific landing pages
- Country-specific hosting
- Long-term national SEO strategies
Checklist to rank nationally using SEO
1. Nationwide keyword research
As always, doing keyword research at the beginning of any SEO campaign is highly recommended.
To target nationwide keywords for SEO, you’re going need to avoid speaking directly about the city you operate in and more about the county if anything.
Your website’s meta-tags could consist of the company name, the sector you work in or the service your business provides and not mention a city at all. Just be sure that your researched keywords are included.
2. Set a preferred language
Often missed by some but this simple code mistake could be hurting your website’s SEO value nationally.
If your website has the hreflang attribute set to “en-US”, you’re telling Google that your website’s content is written for American visitors.
This could mean both things, your SEO value isn’t as strong in your specific country, but maybe stronger in the US. If you’re UK-based and have UK spelling in your content — it may get classified as incorrect, as it’s not spelt in US spelling.
If your business is trying to SEO nationality within the UK, it could be worth setting the hreflang attribute to “en-GB” to tell Google that your website content is written for UK visitors.
3. Consider city-specific landing pages
Understanding that user-intent plays a role in SEO is important too. This means, your visitor’s search term should align with their intent of your content matching their desired result.
When searching on Google, you might see different results and positions based on the location you’re searching from.
For example; as we’re a St Neots based web design company, Googling “Affordable Web Design” from St Neots, may show us on page-1 in St Neots but page-2 in London. Whereas, the keyword mentions no specific location.
This is because our landing page and other content heavily mentions St Neots, but not London — therefore, showing us at two different positions.
Using this example; to SEO nationally across major cities in the UK, we could create landing pages that are search-optimised for London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds for example — pushing out more and more search engine ranking results when searched in these specific cities.
As a bonus, you may even start to generate city-specific local leads, due to your website ranking for the city-based keywords too.
4. Consider country-specific based hosting
For both local and national SEO, having a reliable in-country based hosting provider can be extremely useful if the majority of your customers are based there.
This allows your customers to access your website faster, which is great form a user-experience perspective and also for Google too. As page-load time, therefore website accessibility, are considered to be SEO ranking factors for Google.
5. Long-term national SEO strategies
Once you’ve successfully nationally established rankings for your business, you should look into becoming the absolute leader in your industry. This would include; content creation strategies, re-optimising old content and continuing to build upon your established authority — always providing more and more value for your visitors.