Key Takeaways
- You have to gain topical authority to rank nationally
- Boosting your domain rating & consistently creating optimized content are the two most important factors to being competitive
- Each industry/market is completely unique so we have to use blanket strategies & custom methods
There are many different factors that go into making a national SEO strategy successful, and discounting important variables could make your campaign fail.
In this blog post, we will discuss the tactics and strategies needed to successfully employ a national SEO campaign.
We will also provide some helpful tips on how to avoid common mistakes made by business owners when trying to optimize their websites for a national audience.
If you’re in need of an immediate campaign see our national SEO services.
The research
Preceding the creation of any web page is a deep phase of keyword research & competitor analysis.
Next, we deeply assess the business to determine exactly what types of services and/or products are being offered.
With this information, we’ll be able to create pages that satisfy search intent, both for the user & the Googlebot.
(*Key Note*)
- Every industry/niche is completely different in terms of search competitiveness, so we have to alter our approach accordingly.
The 4 types of search intent
1.) Informational (How, what, who, where, why, etc.)
2.) Navigational (Brand names, name of a product/service)
3.) Commercial Investigation (Best, top, pricing, review, etc.)
4.) Transactional (Buy, order, purchase)
Domain Rating | Optimized Content
To compete on a national level (in most markets) we need the following two things:
1.) A high domain rating
2.) SEO-optimized content
Boosting your domain rating requires link building.
Therefore, a vital part of our national SEO strategy is the creation of high-quality, relevant backlinks.
In order to rank well in the search engines, you need to have high-quality links pointing back to your website.
How do you create a national SEO strategy?
Creating a national SEO strategy requires a clear, well-defined roadmap as to where you need to go & how you need to get there.
When you’re generating content at scale you need to have a refined, methodical approach, or else backtracking is inevitable, & in some cases completely unavoidable.
Therefore, once we’ve conducted keyword research, performed competitor analysis, & understood our client’s business, we begin creating our topical map.
Pictured above is a snapshot of a small segment of a topical map that we’ve created for content marketing.
This mind mapping technique allows us to delve deeply into advanced categorization, which is useful for:
- Our website structure
- A positive UX (user experience)
- Crawling/indexing of our web pages
- Planned content creation
- Interlinking our pages/posts
- Gaining topical authority
Remember, the goal is to raise our domain rating while gaining topical authority.
This technique extends our tier, or coverage, of potential keywords that we can rank as time progresses.
It also tells Google that we’re the “experts” in said “field”, since we’re creating optimized content on virtually every subject matter within our niche.
The 3 main advantages of this national SEO strategy:
- Consistent increase in targeted web traffic
- Boosted domain rating which extends the range of potential keywords we can rank in the future
- Exceptionally enhanced digital real estate
How hard is it to rank on a national scale?
It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to rank on a national scale. You need to have high-quality content, links, and a strong domain rating. Without any of these, it will be difficult to rank your website nationally.
It also takes a lot of time. None of these advanced tactics/strategies can be implemented overnight. As discussed, every industry/market is entirely unique so the competition will vary, but a realistic timeline is at least 6 months – 1 year.