Expanding Your SEO into New Target Regions

Competing in today’s digital landscape means gearing up your website for search engine optimisation (SEO). This is because Google and other search engines factor in a wide range of metrics and elements in ranking websites.

With that, you need to consider both visitors and search crawlers when building your page to make the most out of SEO. At the end of the day, SEO is crucial in driving organic traffic to your site and dominating your niche.

Putting your local and national niche in mind, you can expand your SEO to target more regions and expand your reach.

An SEO strategy that focuses on your local niche is still vital in building a strong foundation for your brand.

However, expanding your SEO reach offers tons of benefits in improving your company’s brand awareness, potential sales, customer relations, and community.

Benefits of Expanding Your SEO Reach

Google and other search engines are becoming smarter. Search engines aren’t only looking for keywords on sites but also keep content quality and optimisation methods in check.

Additionally, search engines also utilise various ranking methods to rank websites. Some factors include:

• Link-building from other sites to your own
• How primary and latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords show up on your site
• How many users click through your link in SERPs to view it

And those are just a few.

Roughly 94% of web traffic comes from organic search. With that sheer amount of traffic, SEO is crucial in attracting more visitors to your site and expanding your brand influence.

On the other hand, ranking on the first page of SERPs can take some time, depending on several variables such as budget, competition, and content quality. However, your efforts in SEO will usually pay off in the end.

John Mueller, a Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, states that it could still take months or a year for a large-scale SEO strategy to impact your website ranking.

However, if your business primarily operates online, your potential ROI will be worth it. Expanding SEO is essential for small businesses since it lets you reach new target locations and expand your influence much more quickly as you grow.

Should I Expand My Business Into New Territories?

Growth is crucial for any business’ long-term survival. That’s why every startup brand or eCommerce site should always look for growth opportunities.

In other words, expanding your business into new territories is a proven way of growing your business. An excellent way to start is by including a Service Areas or Locations section on your website to let visitors know that you serve where they live.

Additionally, if you want to dominate multiple locations, you must create geo-targeted and service-specific pages. Both of these can benefit search crawlers and visitors. That’s because crawlers can rank your site in a particular location and direct clients where you need them to go.

National SEO: eCommerce’s Final Frontier

For any business that ultimately thrives online, the location should not matter. Even so, national SEO will prove to be a critical strategy in winning your niche on a larger scale.

While national SEO is more expensive compared than local SEO, it can have a massive impact on your business once you successfully implement your national SEO campaign.

Unlike the smaller-scale SEO approach, competition on a national level tends to be much more challenging. Besides, what works in your local niche may not prove useful nationally.

That said, you can choose to go for the long shot and aim for national SEO by walking the long and winding road and expanding your SEO campaign into new target locations one at a time.

Key Points to Consider Before Expanding Your SEO

Before you launch your page to new locations, here are some things to consider.

1. Location and Proximity

If you’re a service provider or you run a brick-and-mortar store for your business, consider how close the target location is to your original position.

Along those lines, do you think you will spend more time travelling than doing actual business? Do you have the proper licenses to expand your service?

Starting your brand within your city or local niche is always better and gradually expands to neighbouring cities rather than crossing the map 80 kilometres away.

Also, by keeping the previous questions in mind, you’ll be on your way to ranking better in new regions.

2. Industry

Your niche or industry can be robust in one area and weak in another. Because of that, you must focus on expanding to regions or cities that are most profitable for you while keeping location and proximity in mind.

Furthermore, getting noticed in a local market is more manageable, especially for both new and experienced brands, because you won’t need much domain authority.

Also, if your industry is relatively new, it would be a practical idea to grow your business before expanding it to maximise your impact.

3. Competition

Before you set foot on uncharted territories, be aware of the existing local businesses. Because the more established the competition is, the more you will compete in search engine results.

To determine your potential competitor in a new location, you can run a google search with your keywords on it and see who comes up.

For local search results, type the same keywords into Google Maps and locate the names in local packs — which are sections of Google search results that show locations of businesses related to your search.

Additionally, you can always seek an SEO agency to perform a competitor analysis, which is a painstaking yet proven way to give you insights in expanding your business.

4. You (Your business, skillset, and resources)

Do you have what it takes to compete in the new location? If so, can you adapt to the changing tides of the area’s industry while maintaining other areas? How about your competitor, do you have the skillset and resources to dominate them?

Answering those questions and keeping them in mind throughout your SEO campaign could help you gain more insight into understanding your capabilities to expand your SEO into new regions.

Noticing the impacts of SEO on your website, as stated previously, can take time. That said, you have to prepare for the long haul and commit to your objectives. Otherwise, all your resources spent on SEO would be futile, and you won’t be able to expand your brand to new horizons.

How to Expand Your SEO to Improve Reach

Having a good grip of what it takes to expand your SEO is already half the battle. What’s left to do is walk the talk and know how to expand your SEO to broaden your influence.

1. Incorporate Local Keywords on Your Insights Page

Out of many SEO marketing strategies out there, content marketing stands out as one of the best. Building an insights page or blog section is a proven way to incorporate keywords without stuffing them in one corner.

Every article should be relevant to your industry and must have a primary keyword and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) or secondary keywords based on your topic.

As we said earlier, publishing a location page for new regions can also help expand your reach as it lets search crawlers index your site locally.

Customers also tend to search for how-tos and new information about your products or services, and by publishing quality content, you are directing more of them to your site. Thus, increasing your likelihood to top the search results on your keywords.

2. Utilise Multimedia for Your Content

As discussed, search crawlers rank websites through a variety of factors, such as updating your webpage, building quality links, and using multiple forms of media. Besides, the best SEO campaigns focus on both search indexing and user experience through images, animations, video, and text.

Now, you might wonder how expanding your SEO can benefit from images. But you can optimise non-text media for search engines by embedding them with metadata that also incorporates relevant keywords on your local niche.

That way, you’re strengthening your SEO expansion strategy and also enhances browsing experience for your users.

3. Enhance SEO Credibility by Getting Backlinks to Your Site

One way to become authoritative in the eyes of search engines is to earn backlinks from other relevant websites. You can do so by affiliating with other companies and let them publish links on their pages back to your site.

If successfully performed, getting backlinks from new locations will boost your credibility with search engines. Thus, increasing your chances of ranking on search results pages.

4. Leverage Social Media With Your Website

Finally, integrating your website and social media profile is essential in expanding your SEO marketing strategies. More than 85% of Generation Z learn about new products through social media.

That’s why social media remains to be the leading platform to improve brand influence and expand your SEO into new target locations. Also, make sure that you reflect every product and content on your website to your social media to drive traffic back to your site continuously.

Conclusion

Expanding your SEO into new locations isn’t a walk in the park. However, with enough customer/competition research and the right SEO team, you can most certainly dominate your niche at a broader level.

On the other hand, overseeing a growing online business can be daunting, especially if you’re doing all the work by yourself. 

Here at Red Search, we help you develop a sustainable search engine optimisation strategy to maintain your influence while expanding your business.

Our SEO experts will help you launch your site off the ground and maintain your spot on the first page of SERPs. Reach out to our team at 1300 101 712 or drop your message in our contact form.