How do I not mess up a national seo strategy? All advice appreciated in advance!

[asbchris]

Hello Moz Friends

So I have always worked on local seo, websites, and digital brand management.

But one of my clients wants to go national. They sell building materials and the competition is pretty fierce.

So here is my question and I thank you in advance for any advice:

How do I not mess up a national seo strategy, based on local seo efforts?

So for an example, say I put the NAP in the footer, but my client sells to 49 states, will this hurt a national campaign?

And on the opposite, would getting local links from say construction websites in California, if my NAP is from Florida, hurt or help?

I understand that most of this is seo 101, but I am so used to local seo, that I don't want to cause national issues by doing something local.

Thank you again Moz Friends

"Have a Positive Day"

Chris

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Chris

The main issue here is going to be authority - you could structure this perfectly and still see no dice with ranking these location / service pages. Factor in no location signals and this could be super difficult.

I would look to learn from the sites that already rank well in terms of structure and if the client is gung-ho to do this despite all the caveats then set up a few locations and get some ranking data.

You can then at least get an idea where these pages will sit. Remember though - we have no location signals so you are basically ranking these as location pages and all the unique content in the world will likely not get you over the authority hurdle here.

Ultimately you have to start small, do some testing and measure as you go.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

[asbchris]

Wow Marcus I hope to be at the level of knowledge that you are on day! Simply amazing answer.

So my client is local with one address for the main office where they ship the building materials anywhere in the U.S.

They have a network of contractors all across the same region who will in terms use the materials to build houses and garages etc. so most people will search for Garage Kits and then see my client also builds them.

So my fear is to limit the proper seo. But not sure if I add categories like website (Dot) com/garages/California would benefit a national level campaign, or if I keep the site/garages but add another silo of pages such as site/service-areas/California

of course I know that every page must be unique. It's not plug and play state and city names.

But I'm not sure which approach is better because do I need the specific modifiers like the item being sold, Garages, then the state. Or if the search engines are smart enough to know that we have products and our service area pages designate the areas?

but then look at craiglist, you have the city first then the categories.

I just don't want to mess anything up. I have complete freedom to do whatever I need to do.

I am here though as I know some of the best people in the world are in the Moz community!

Thank you again Marcus your awesome!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Chris

The very first step here is to determine what is realistically achievable. Maybe if I give you some leading questions you can work through these and get a better handle on how to play this.

1. Are they a local business? If so - are you only targeting local results currently?

2. Do they only have a single physical location?

3. Are the results primarily for local businesses? Is this true if the keywords are used with and without location modifiers? ("buiding materials birmingham", & just "building materials")

4. What kind of companies are listed in the results? Big brands? Local businesses with a single location? National companies with multiple locations? Online players that play nationally?

I am in Birmingham, UK and have just done a few searches for 'building materials' and 'building materials birmingham'.

When I add a location the results are all for local companies as expected. These seem to be individual building suppliers and for larger chains with multiple locations. Even the larger chains seem to mention that they are the 'local' supplier and really push the fact they have a location that is local to the customer.

If I search for just 'building materials' I do still see local results, organic results for large multi location businesses and a few national online players.

I see a few national players so I would be looking to get a handle on the top three that mirror what your client is trying to achieve here. Get the domain authority and page authority and link profiles of these three players to get some figures behind what you are doing here. I would be looking at OSE, Majestic, aHrefs etc and pooling all that data together and comparing to where your client is currently. This is never as scientific as we would like but it gives you some figures to use in estimating just how much work would be involved here. Really dig into those link profiles to get a feel for what you will need to do here. Look what other advertising these big players do. Consider offline activities as well. TV? Radio? If you are in the US then this may be a much bigger market than the UK so again factor that in - the wider the market the larger the competition.

I would be looking to propose a strategy based on the available metrics to my client. Whether that means using the current site and building on that or setting up a new site or even getting local distribution centres. We can do our research and use the search engine results to help us determine what a realistic strategy may look like.

So you want to know:

• Situation - Where are we currently?
• Competition - What does the competition look like?
• Objectives - Where do want to be?
• Strategy - How are we going to get there?
• Tactics - How specifically are we going to do what we need to get where need to be (link building strategies etc)
• Controls - How will we measure success? What is our timeline here?

Simply put there are a lot of moving parts here and our job as consultants is to help the client understand the often herculean effort involved in being a national player. If you can give them a rough idea of what you think it will take based on some facts and figures you can design a campaign and manage their expectations.

Another consideration is whether you can be a local business and national business? well you can but it may make things confusing from a messaging perspective so you likely need to get that sorted first. I may even be tempted to look at splitting this out but I would always try to be led by the research.

I think it is really super important to know what is required and to explain that whilst this is not a perfect science these metrics give us an idea what needs to be done. From that a campaign can be designed to help the client get where they need to be and to move from a small local business to a national player may be something that needs to be tackled over 1, 3 or even 5 years. Let the data guide you.

Hope that helps - as ever there are no easy answers but don't be afraid to tell your client this. If you can shine a light on the path they can determine if they want to walk it.

Cheers
Marcus