Local SEO vs National SEO vs Global: Which Is Right for Your Business?

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about optimizing your online presence to attract customers in a specific geographic area​creekmoremarketing.com. If you run a home services business like a plumbing or electrical company serving a particular city or region, local SEO helps ensure that people nearby can find you when they search. For example, imagine you own a plumbing business in Phoenix, Arizona. You want your website and business listing to appear when someone in Phoenix searches for “emergency plumber near me” or “Phoenix plumber.” Local SEO strategies make that possible by sending strong signals to search engines about your location and services.

Local SEO is crucial for businesses with physical locations or defined service areas – think plumbers, electricians, restaurants, local retailers, doctors, and so on​. These businesses benefit from showing up in localized search results (including Google’s map listings) at the exact moment someone nearby needs their service. In fact, local searches often come from customers ready to act: about 80% of local searches convert into a purchase or visit​ That means if someone in your town searches for a service you offer, there’s a very high chance they’ll become your customer – but only if they find you!

Some hallmarks of local SEO include appearing in Google’s Local Pack (the map and business listing that shows for location-based queries) and having a presence on Google Maps. Let’s illustrate this with a quick example of a local search result:

In the image above, you can see a search for “quality garage door repair company near me.” Google recognizes this as a local intent query and displays a Places map with three garage door companies in the vicinity. Each listing shows the business name, rating, address, hours, and phone number. This is the power of local SEO – getting your business listed in these prominent local results so nearby customers can quickly see and choose you. To achieve this, a local business must focus on specific tactics that signal relevance to the local area.

Key elements of local SEO often include:

• Google Business Profile optimization: Claiming and verifying your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and keeping it updated is fundamental. This improves your chances of showing up in the map pack and local Finder results​‍. For our Phoenix plumber, this means having a verified Google listing with correct address, service areas, hours, and plenty of positive reviews.
• Local citations and directories: Ensuring your business NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information is consistent across online directories (Yelp, Yellow Pages, HomeAdvisor, etc.) helps build credibility. The more Google sees your business cited around the web with consistent details, the more it trusts your location and legitimacy.
• Reviews and ratings: Encouraging happy customers to leave reviews on Google and other platforms. High ratings and frequent reviews not only entice customers but also improve local search ranking. A homeowner with a leaky pipe is more likely to click a plumber with 5-star reviews.
• Location-targeted keywords: Incorporating local keywords on your website, like city names or phrases such as “near me,” into your content. For instance, having a page or blog post about “How to Find a Reliable Plumber in Phoenix” can boost local relevance. Local SEO tends to focus on long-tail keywords that include specific locations (e.g. “best electricians in Scottsdale AZ”).
• Localized content and pages: Creating content that caters to local interests or issues. A roofing contractor might publish blog articles about common roofing problems in the local climate. Or a pest control company could have pages dedicated to each suburb it serves, with unique info for that area. Regularly publishing content tailored to local audiences (community news, local case studies, etc.) signals that you are engaged in the local community​.
• Local backlinks: Getting links from other local businesses, chambers of commerce, local news sites, or community organizations. For example, sponsoring a local charity event might earn your plumbing business a link from the event’s website – this kind of local backlink can boost your local SEO strength.
• Mobile-friendly site: Many local searches happen on mobile devices when people are on the go. Ensuring your website loads fast and looks good on mobile is important for user experience and SEO.

In short, local SEO aims to make your business the obvious answer when someone in your area searches for the services or products you offer. It combines traditional SEO best practices with specific local signals like maps, directories, and geo-specific content. Soderman SEO has extensive experience with local SEO – our team has helped countless home service companies (from plumbers to landscapers) dominate their local search results by applying these tactics effectively.

What Is National SEO?

While local SEO zooms in on a particular region, National SEO casts a wide net across an entire country. The goal of national SEO is to improve visibility for searches on a broad, national (or even international) scale, rather than focusing on any one city or locality. This is especially relevant for businesses that can serve customers anywhere, such as e-commerce stores, online services, or national brands.

If you run an e-commerce business, for example, you likely want to reach customers all over the country (and maybe beyond). Let’s say you have an online store that sells custom phone accessories and ships to all 50 states. You’d use national SEO strategies to rank for terms like “custom phone cases” or “buy phone accessories online,” which have a nationwide audience. Your potential customer could be in Phoenix, Philadelphia, or Portland – location doesn’t limit your business. National SEO helps you appear in those search results, no matter where the searcher is.

The scope of national SEO is much broader: you’re targeting a larger audience and more generic keywords (no geographic qualifiers). This means competition can be fiercer. You might be up against big-box retailers or well-known brands for popular keywords. As a result, national SEO often requires a more extensive content and optimization strategy to stand out on a nationwide level​.

Key components of a national SEO strategy include:

• High-quality content creation: Content is king in SEO, but for national SEO you typically need to produce content that appeals to a broad audience. This could mean in-depth blog posts, product guides, videos, infographics – any content that targets the interests or problems of your ideal customers across the country. For our phone accessories store, content might include articles like “10 Best Phone Case Materials Ranked” or a video series on phone customization tips. The content should be valuable and optimized for relevant non-location-specific keywords (e.g. “best custom phone cases 2025”) that your target shoppers are searching.
• Keyword research (broad intent): National SEO opens the door to wider keyword research because you’re not appending locations to your terms. You’ll explore which keywords have significant search volume nationwide for your products or services. These could be competitive head terms as well as long-tail queries that indicate purchase intent. For instance, targeting “phone case” alone is highly competitive, but “durable phone case for iPhone 14” might be a more attainable keyword that still has national reach.
• On-page optimization: Ensuring your website’s pages are well-optimized for your target keywords and provide a great user experience. This includes crafting compelling meta titles and descriptions, using header tags effectively, and keeping content well-structured. Every page of your site – whether it’s a product page or a blog article – should be optimized so that search engines understand its relevance to the keywords you’re targeting.
• Technical SEO and performance: Since you’re competing on a larger stage, the technical health of your site is crucial. Fast page load times, mobile responsiveness, secure HTTPS, and clean site architecture all contribute to better rankings. Google wants to deliver results that not only have relevant content but also a smooth user experience. Slow or error-prone sites can struggle to rank nationally, especially against well-optimized competitors.
• Link building and authority: In national SEO, backlinks from reputable sites are a major factor in building your domain’s authority. The more quality websites link to your content, the more search engines trust your site as an authority in your field. Strategies here might include outreach for guest blogging, creating share-worthy infographics or research that others cite, getting press mentions, etc. For our example e-commerce store, a mention in a popular tech blog or a link from a “Top 10 Accessories Sites” article would be valuable. Over time, earning these backlinks helps boost your overall rankings across many keywords​‍.
• Less emphasis on local listings: Unlike local SEO, you won’t be as concerned with local directories or map packs (unless you also have physical stores). A company focused purely on national SEO might still have a Google Business Profile for their headquarters, but it’s not a central part of their strategy. Customer reviews still matter for reputation, but they might be on a nationwide scale (e.g. reviews on the e-commerce site itself or on platforms like Trustpilot) rather than Google’s local reviews​.
• Broader marketing integrations: National SEO often works hand-in-hand with other digital marketing channels like social media, content marketing, and even Google Shopping Ads. For instance, Google Shopping can be a useful complement – ensuring your products appear in the shopping results carousel for relevant searches. The overall digital strategy for a national campaign tends to be multifaceted to capture a wide audience.

In essence, national SEO is “traditional” SEO on a large scale, aiming to rank in the organic results that everyone sees, regardless of location​. It’s ideal for businesses that do not depend on local customers. Soderman SEO’s experts are well-versed in national SEO tactics – we’ve helped online retailers and service providers achieve prominent national rankings by focusing on quality content, technical excellence, and robust backlink profiles. It’s a bigger battlefield than local SEO, but with the right strategy, even smaller businesses can compete for niche keywords nationwide.

Going Global: What About Global SEO?

You might also hear the term Global SEO, which is essentially an extension of national SEO but on an international scale. If your business plans to reach customers in multiple countries or languages, you’ll need to consider global SEO strategies. This is common for companies that ship worldwide or have a presence in various countries (think of a SaaS company catering to users globally, or an e-commerce store selling internationally).

Global SEO involves everything in national SEO, plus some additional considerations:

• Targeting multiple regions or languages: You may need to optimize for different languages or create region-specific versions of your site. For example, if our phone accessories store starts selling to Canada, the UK, and Australia, we might create separate sections of the website (or separate country domains/subdomains) for those audiences. Each might have slight differences in language (U.S. English vs British English) or currency and pricing in local currency.
• Cultural and regional nuances: Successful global SEO means understanding local culture and search behavior. Keywords that work in one country might not be as popular in another. The way people search for a product in the US could differ from how they search in Germany or Japan. You’d want to do keyword research per target market to capture those nuances​.
• Website structure for international SEO: Often, global SEO includes using country-coded top-level domains (ccTLDs) or subdomains/subfolders for different markets – for instance, having a “.co.uk” site for the UK, or “example.com/fr/” for France​. Implementing hreflang tags is also important. Hreflang signals to search engines which language or regional version of a page to show to a user based on their location or language settings​. This prevents, say, your French page from showing to an English searcher.
• International regulations and hosting: Ensuring compliance with laws like GDPR in Europe when dealing with user data​, and possibly hosting your website or content on servers that are fast in your target region for better performance. If you have a Chinese audience, for example, you might need to consider local hosting or the Great Firewall impacts. These factors go beyond typical SEO but are part of a global strategy.
• Local backlinks and authority in each market: Just as with national SEO needing authority, a global site might need to build authority within each country’s online ecosystem. That could mean earning links from sites in each target country and getting press or mentions in each locale, which can be a large undertaking.

Global SEO is a complex but rewarding strategy for businesses truly aiming worldwide. It requires more resources because you’re essentially doing SEO in multiple markets at once. However, if you have a product with international demand, tailoring your SEO to each region can significantly boost your global visibility.

For instance, consider an e-commerce business that started with national SEO in the US, then expanded to Canada, Europe, and Asia. They might maintain an English site for the US/Canada, a multilingual site for Europe (with sections in French, German, Spanish, etc.), and possibly even a separate site for Asia with appropriate languages. Soderman SEO can guide companies through this process too – from choosing the right site structure to researching foreign-language keywords – ensuring that your SEO strategy scales as your business goes global.

Key Differences Between Local SEO and National SEO

Now that we’ve defined both local and national (and touched on global) SEO, let’s compare local vs. national SEO head-to-head. Both aim to increase your visibility on search engines, but they do so in different ways and target different audiences​. Here are some of the most important differences to consider:

• Target Audience & Geographic Scope:Local SEO targets searchers in a specific city or region. It’s all about neighborhoods, cities, or service areas. For example, a Phoenix-based plumber only cares about people searching in Phoenix (or perhaps nearby towns). In contrast, National SEO targets a broad audience across an entire country. A company selling online software nationwide isn’t limited by location – a customer in any state (or multiple countries if global) is relevant​. Essentially, local is narrowcast to your vicinity, while national is broadcast to everyone, everywhere.
• Keywords and Search Queries:
  With local SEO, keywords often include location modifiers or imply local intent. Search terms like “electrician near me” or “best electrician in [City]” are classic local queries​. These indicate the user wants a nearby solution. National SEO, on the other hand, optimizes for broader keywords without geographic terms, such as “buy organic coffee online” or “enterprise project management software.” The intent may be broader or research-oriented when location isn’t specified. Local queries also tend to have high commercial intent (someone searching “near me” often needs something ASAP), whereas national queries might span informational searches as well. Long-tail local keywords (more specific phrases that include locations) are usually less competitive than the big generic terms national brands go after.
• Search Results Features:
  One of the clearest differences is how search engines display results. Local searches trigger special results like the Local Pack (the map with 3 business listings) and often show Google Maps results or business knowledge panels. If you search for a local service, you’ll likely see map results, addresses, and reviews right at the top. National searches typically show the standard organic results (webpage links) and maybe shopping results or knowledge graphs for well-known brands, but not the local map pack. In short, local SEO competes for visibility in maps and local listings, while national SEO competes for the traditional organic listings on the search engine results page.
• Ranking Factors & Tactics:
  While there is overlap, some ranking factors carry more weight in local SEO. For example, having a Google Business Profile with many positive reviews can dramatically improve local ranking in maps​, but it has minimal effect on national organic rankings. Local SEO tactics include building local citations, managing reviews, adding local business schema markup, and creating location-specific pages​. National SEO tactics focus more on overall site quality: content depth, site authority, and technical SEO improvements. Backlinks matter to both, but a local business might benefit more from a link on a local news site, whereas a national business craves links from high-authority industry sites, regardless of location. Local SEO also tends to emphasize on-page signals like including your city name or region in title tags and content, which isn’t a concern for national unless you’re doing a hybrid strategy.
• Content Strategy:
  For local SEO, content often revolves around local topics. A home services business might publish articles like “How to Prepare Your [City] Home for Monsoon Season” – something that ties your expertise to the local area. You might also highlight local case studies, testimonials from local clients, or participate in local community events (and blog about them). National SEO content covers broader topics to attract a wider audience. An e-commerce site might create gift guides, product comparison posts, or general “how-to” articles relevant to their products that anyone anywhere might search for. The tone and examples used in content may differ: local content can mention local landmarks or community issues, while national content stays generally applicable to all readers​.
• Competition Level:
  Generally, national SEO is more competitive because you’re up against potentially every relevant business in the country (and big players with big budgets). Local SEO narrows the field to businesses in your immediate area. For instance, ranking #1 for “plumber” nationally is nearly impossible for a small business – you’d be competing with huge websites and directories. But ranking #1 for “plumber in Phoenix” is attainable with a smart local SEO plan, because you’re only competing with plumbers in Phoenix. This often means local SEO can yield results faster or with less cost than trying to win broad national terms​. Many small businesses find that targeting a niche local market gives a better ROI than trying to rank nationally for generic terms where giants rule the page.
• Conversion and Customer Journey:
  Local customers often take action quickly – someone searching for “emergency electrician near me” is likely to call as soon as they find a suitable option. The conversion might be a phone call or an in-person visit. National customers might have a longer journey – they could compare options, read reviews, or research over time since they have more choices. The conversion is likely an online purchase or inquiry. This means local SEO efforts often focus on making it easy for the customer to call or find the store (clear phone numbers, address, driving directions), whereas national SEO efforts focus on smooth e-commerce experiences or persuasive online content since the transaction is online.

Despite these differences, local and national SEO also share some fundamentals. Both require optimizing your website’s code and structure, offering valuable content, and keeping an eye on SEO best practices like mobile usability and page speed​. In both cases, search engines reward websites that provide a great user experience and useful information to searchers. And importantly, neither is a one-time effort – SEO (local or national) needs ongoing attention, updates, and adaptation to search engine changes​.

Choosing the Right SEO Strategy for Your Business

How do you decide whether to focus on local SEO, national SEO, or a mix of both? The decision comes down to your business type, your target customers, and your growth goals. Here are some guidelines to help you choose:

• If you are a local business with a physical presence or service area: Emphasize Local SEO. This is true for most home services companies (plumbers, HVAC, electricians, landscapers), medical practices, restaurants, brick-and-mortar retail shops, etc. Your bread-and-butter is people within driving distance. Local SEO will give you the best visibility to those customers and typically the best return on investment for small-to-medium businesses. For example, a small bakery in one city will get far more benefit optimizing for “[bakery in YourTown]” than trying to rank for “buy cupcakes” globally. With local SEO, you can often compete and win against larger national brands in your local domain because you have the home-field advantage there.
• If you operate nationally or online-only without location ties: National SEO is your go-to. E-commerce stores, online services, B2B companies serving clients nationwide – these should invest in a broader SEO strategy. You want to capture consumers wherever they are searching from. National SEO will build your overall online presence and draw in traffic from all corners. Keep in mind it may take more time and resources to rank for competitive terms, so be strategic in choosing your battles (keywords) and consider complementing SEO with other channels (like social media or PPC) for a multi-pronged approach.
• If you have a global/international audience: You may need to incorporate Global SEO tactics. Perhaps start with national SEO in your primary market, then expand to international SEO as you grow. Global SEO becomes important if you notice significant traffic or demand from other countries, or if international expansion is a goal. This often applies to technology companies, large e-commerce platforms, or tourism/hospitality businesses that cater to travelers. Make sure to localize content for each region and handle the technical aspects (hreflang, local domains) as discussed earlier for the best results.
• Hybrid situations – you need both: Some businesses actually need a combination of local and national SEO. For instance, consider a company that franchises its business. Franchise businesses often have individual locations (needing local SEO for each franchise location) and a corporate site that targets national keywords. Or think of a retailer with physical stores regionally and an online store for the whole country – they would do local SEO for the store locations plus national SEO for the e-commerce side. In these cases, a blended strategy is ideal. You create location-specific pages and Google Business Profiles for each store (local SEO), while also maintaining a strong overall website and content strategy for your brand nationally. Managing such a hybrid approach can be challenging, but when done right, it lets you capture local foot traffic and broad online traffic together.

Ultimately, aligning your SEO strategy with your actual service area ensures you don’t waste effort on the wrong tactics​. As the Semrush research pointed out, a local business that only serves a specific area shouldn’t spend resources trying to rank for generic national terms that won’t convert to actual customers. Conversely, a national e-commerce brand won’t gain much from ranking for dozens of small city terms where they have no physical presence.

If you’re unsure which approach will yield the best results, consider consulting with experts. Soderman SEO can analyze factors like your industry, where your customers come from, and what your competitors are doing, to craft a tailored SEO plan. Sometimes the answer is straightforward (all local or all national), but other times a mix is needed. Our team at Soderman SEO has worked with purely local businesses, purely online businesses, and those with a foot in both worlds – and we know how to maximize SEO ROI in each scenario.

Get Expert Help from Soderman SEO

Navigating the world of SEO can be overwhelming, especially when deciding between a local or national focus. The good news is you don’t have to figure it out alone. Soderman SEO has specialized expertise in both local and national SEO strategies, and we’re here to help you succeed in search results at any scale. Whether you’re a home services provider aiming to dominate your local market or an e-commerce business looking to increase nationwide visibility, our friendly experts can develop a customized plan that fits your needs and budget.

Ready to boost your search presence and attract more customers? Get in touch with Soderman SEO today for a free consultation. We’ll evaluate your current online presence and discuss how we can elevate your rankings – locally, nationally, or globally. With our proven strategies and hands-on guidance, you can outshine competitors and make it easy for your target audience to find you. Contact Soderman SEO now and let’s start growing your business through smart SEO strategy!