5 Tips to Improve Your Regional SEO Strategy

Ranking for a greater region is better than optimizing to a hyperlocal audience for some businesses. These five tips can help improve your regional SEO.

Ranking for a greater region might make more sense for some businesses than optimizing for hyperlocal. This is especially true if you offer services in different areas and don’t get much foot traffic.

You can extend your reach with a well-planned regional SEO strategy without spending a fortune on physical offices in every single city.

If you’re doing it right, you can still rank high in the SERPs of the highly sought-after “near me” searches.

Local SEO vs. regional SEO

There is a significant variation between regional and local SEO.

According to Brian Harnish

“Local SEO” is a strategic approach that optimizes local brick-and-mortar businesses.

Many service area businesses (also known as non-brick-and-mortar businesses) attempt to implement local search engine optimization by opening virtual offices to increase their visibility on the local SERP.

Google’s guidelines state that virtual offices can be established as long your staff is available during business hours.

You should not use this as an vindicate to stop you from creating your local SEO strategy in your area. Google is aware of many standard virtual office providers and actively suspends GMB listing.

You can always get your suspended listing reinstated, but it’s a hassle.

If you file a report by a user or Google suspects that your actions are against their guidelines, your listing might be removed again.

To reduce the impact of SEO on your business and organic visibility, here are five tips.

1. Research Your Area

While we might think we know where we are serving, complex data can show us otherwise.

Before you get started with the following steps, ensure you have a good idea of the cities driving the most search interest in your products or services.

Perform local keyword research

Add geo modifiers (geo modifiers) to your keywords for a thorough keyword search.

This can be compared with your Google Analytics report to determine if you see any similar trends.

Once you have a list, rank them as per their search popularity.

Grupp Your Cities

Next, we’ll find which cities can be grouped into single regions. We want to reduce how many regional pages we create in step 3.

If I am trying to rank for SEO services in Dallas, I might also want to target common business districts such as Addison Plano, Frisco, Frisco, and Irving.

It is also worth noting Fort Worth, located less than 40 miles from Dallas. Therefore, it may be good to combine both areas depending on which regions you are focusing on.

This stage may see us end up with a single DFW Page targeting North Texas.

2. Limit Doorway Pages

Google defines portal pages as “… websites or pages designed to rank highly in search results.

They elaborated that doorway pages can be a series of duplicate or similar pages that all lead you to the same destination, which may affect the user’s experience.

Creating doorway pages is often done in the form of duplicate landing pages. This trend should be stopped.

They can sometimes work, but it is a sad truth.

Increase the quality of your content with keyword intent analysis

Semrush’s keyword-intent metric makes it easier than ever to align your keywords with the correct audience and create the right content.

I believe that there is a right and wrong way to approach local SEO.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed in a Webmaster Hangout in late 2017 that well-crafted doors pages could be a good strategy if used correctly.

3. Make Regional Pages Better

My guide to the perfect page explains how to create a regional page.

A page for a specific location and one for a region should have the same elements. But, pages for regional areas need to be more detailed to offer a rich user experience.

Include an area-specific description

Your description must be unique.

This could be the difference between a well-crafted page for a region and a page for a doorway.

You can include these things in your business description to increase the page’s value.

• History of the region’s business.
• Your services are relevant to local consumers and businesses.
• Notable projects in the vicinity (include photos).
• These services and goods may be top-rated in the local area.
• Unique selling proposition.
• You can describe the actual service area using landmarks or cross-sections of major highways.
• Include internal linking to other pages in the same region.

Mention Local Clients & Testimonials

If your business is B2B, you should include any noteworthy clients that users might easily recognize.

Discuss your work with these clients and attach photos.

If photos are not possible, logos will be accepted.

Include testimonials from these clients, if you can.

Do you want to go one step forward? Video testimonials can be made in this region.

Add photos

This is where your competitive edge can be achieved.

You might find a competitor using the same strategy and adding general stock photography to your region page.

Here are some tips for photos:

• Your logo should be prominently featured in the first photo.
• Optimize your image name, alt text, and other information.
• Show us images of your goods and services in action.
• Recognizable landmarks from this region should be included.

Include Service-Area map

You can create a custom map of the region that includes a section highlighted showing your service area.

This could be used in concurrence with the section of your description that describes your service area.

As much as possible, collaborate with a developer to develop an interactive map to improve the user’s experience.

If applicable, physical office address.

A local office can be costly. This may not be required for all businesses.

However, it can help to boost your local ranking by having at least one physical office.

4. GMB Local Office Vs. Service Area Business

A Google My Business (GMB) profile is an easy way to establish a physical business office if you can afford it, even if it is just for answering phone calls and dispatching service personnel.

Some businesses may not have the financial resources to rent multiple offices. This may make it difficult for them to plan their strategy.

I recommend starting a service business in GMB and extending my net in these cases.

5. A niche-based link-building strategy is necessary.

You can find many different types of local link-building strategies.

But, the best approach to reach your goal is an integrated one.

These are some suggestions for getting new links to your pages in your region:

• Participate in charity events, and do some PR.
• Send your page to Industry-Specific Directories.
• Testimonials are available.
• For your clients’ websites, write guest posts about your work.