Local SEO Services - The Importance of Local Knowledge

SEO is very much an art and not a science. Local knowledge becomes important when optimising a website that targets a specific geographic audience and there is no substitute for experience. An optimiser who has operated within a particular geographic region will gradually develop a feel for the volumes of searches for localities within their area. Surrey PC Support focuses on local customers and therefore has significant knowledge of Crawley, Coulsdon, Croydon, Purley, Redhill & Reigate smaller localities in the area.

For example, if an individual lives in Surrey they will know which are the largest towns in the area. They will also know which localities are residential and which are commercial. This can be beneficial when choosing which localities to target for a particular website. An optimser will also learn through experimentation when working on a website that targets a particular region. They will also get a feel for related keyphrases. For example "computer repair" and "IT support" are related. A good optimiser will know which of these phrases has the largest volume or least amount of competition.

The volumes will be far larger for a large town than a small one. So Croydon will see much larger volumes than Caterham simply because more people live in Croydon than Caterham.

Similarly the volumes for a commercial area will be far larger than a similar sized residential area. People expect to find businesses in commercial areas and tend to use those areas in the keywords they use. For example, there will be higher volumes for a commercial area like Sutton than for a residential area like Woodmansterne.

There is also another reason why broader geographic areas see larger volumes than narrower ones. This is to do with the way people look for things using search engines. For example, an individual may be looking for an SEO company. So they may start by looking for “seo”. When they see that the results include all sorts of SEO forums that are not what they are looking for they may make a change to their approach and look for “seo companies”. That may produce results for SEO companies in Edinburgh, Leeds or even New York so these results are pretty unhelpful for an individual based in Surrey. This individual may narrow their focus further and look for “seo companies surrey” or “seo companies croydon”.

This has an interesting effect on Click Through Rates (CTR) from SERPs. Broader terms will have a far lower CTR than narrower terms. Because historical CTR is one of the factors that Google etc look at to rate a website or page, it is important not to target terms that are too broad as this will have a negative effect on a website’s or page’s CTR.

Not only are volumes and CTR important when choosing which keyphrases to target but also the level of competition. Naturally the larger commercial areas will have more competition than smaller commercial areas or residential areas. Over time an optimiser who works in a specific local area will begin to develop a feel for the level of competition for regions.

This knowledge of competition is important because a website that appears on page two for a particular phrase will receive virtually no visits compared to if it were in one of the top five positions. A good optimiser knows that for brand new websites not yet trusted by Google etc it is very difficult to achieve a top five position for competitive words or phrases and often being on page two is virtually pointless.

For this reason it is important to target localities that result in the highest volumes and click through that the site can still achieve a page one ranking. Better to be getting a small number of visits from a particular key word than none at all.

In Summary, local knowledge is important in SEO because of the link between localities and keywords, because of volumes, CTRs and the level of competition. This is why we at Surrey PC Support believe we are in such a strong position to provide excellent SEO services to companies in and around Surrey.