What is the Difference Between Local SEO and Organic SEO?

As someone who actively markets your business online, you’ve certainly come across the terms local SEO and organic SEO. Both of these are excellent search engine optimization techniques, but what is the difference, and—more importantly—which is more effective for your business?

In this article, we’ll look at the similarities and differences between local SEO and organic SEO to help you decide which strategy you should focus on for your business.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a search engine optimization technique that focuses on ranking for keywords relevant to a specific geographical location. It is also referred to as local search engine marketing (LSEM) or local search engine optimization (LSEO). This strategy is typically used by local businesses with physical stores to reach customers in their area. By some estimations, almost half (46%) of all Google searches are local.

Let’s take burgers as an example. If you search the term “burger” on your device, it will most likely return local results and recommendations for burger places in your area rather than recipes for hamburgers. Typically, you’ll see the top three burger places near you according to Google. This type of result is also referred to as Google’s 3-pack or local 3-pack.

Local SEO does not treat links in the same way that traditional SEO does. Instead, this role is played by citations. Citations are simply mentions of your physical address, business name, and phone number across the web. Being cited at all relevant and essential locations in your domain can boost the relevance and authority of your business in Google’s eyes.

In order to have success with a local SEO campaign, you need to have some kind of presence on social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.). It is important for people in your area to be aware of your presence and the products and services you sell, and social media is a great way to raise this kind of awareness.

Benefits of Local SEO

As we touched on above, local SEO offers many benefits for small businesses. Here are three main benefits to consider:

More foot traffic. Local SEO increases your online visibility in your area, which in turn is more likely to increase visitors to your physical location and, hopefully, purchases.

Trustworthiness. Customers are more likely to trust a business that is based in their community, because they can see the business with their own two eyes. Local ratings and reviews from members of your community can further build this trust and credibility.

Cost efficiency. Local SEO campaigns are overwhelmingly more budget-friendly and cost efficient compared to paid search strategies.

Ranking factors for local SEO

Now that you’re aware of what local SEO is and how it can benefit your business, the next logical question is, how can you appear as high as possible in local search results? Here are three factors to be aware of when it comes to local SEO.

Relevancy. Google examines how well a profile matches what the user is searching for, and this match is based on the information that businesses provide about themselves. So even if your restaurant serves world-class burgers, Google won’t know that unless you include that info in your profile.

Current location. Google calculates the distance between each potential search result and the user’s current location to ensure that local results are truly local.

Popularity. A profile’s popularity is based on reviews, comments, ratings and other factors. For instance, if a user searches “best sandwich near me”, “highest rated hotels in New York,” or “top mechanic in my region”, reviews and ratings will be the key ranking factor for the location.

What is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO is the most impactful type of search engine optimization on a grand scale, as it can rank your site all over the world. In organic SEO, you target keywords that are not limited to geography or citation.

In addition to businesses, bloggers, internet marketers, affiliate marketers, and other online organizations use organic SEO to improve their rankings and increase traffic.

The aim of organic SEO is to reach the top places or rankings on SERPs (search engine results pages). To make this happen, a lot of on-page and off-page optimization is required to be done on the website, including:

• meta descriptions

• anchor text optimization 

• title tags

• heading tags

• creating amazing content

• and, building an effective link building strategy

Benefits of Organic SEO

Here are a few of the biggest benefits that organic SEO can offer your business:

Better conversion rates. By improving the user experience, you can also improve the likelihood that visitors to your site will take a desired action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. 

Website traffic. Organic SEO is much more effective at generating relevant traffic to your site, because organic SEO can reach potential visitors from all over the world.

Cheaper than paid search. Similar to local SEO, organic SEO is still a far cheaper and, ultimately, more effective strategy than paid search strategies like Google Ads and sponsored links.

Easily scalable. Performance is easy to measure, which makes organic SEO activities scalable.

Ranking Factors for Organic SEO

Here are several key factors to be aware of when it comes to crafting an organic SEO strategy.

Inbound links. Building inbound links between individual pages on the same domain makes it easier for Google to crawl web pages and their content. Web crawler software automatically searches the internet for webpages and creates an index. This index is then used to rank search results. The better Google understands the content on your site, the more authority and expertise a search engine attributes to your website.

Relevant and high-quality content. Search engines want to provide users with the most relevant and high-quality content available. By creating and publishing high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience, you can improve your ranking in search results.

Website structure and organization. Search engines use the structure and organization of your website to understand the relationship between different pages and to determine which pages are most important.

User experience. Factors such as the design and layout of your website, as well as ease of use, can affect the user experience and impact your search rankings.

Local SEO, Organic SEO, or both?

Every marketing strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. The choice between launching a local SEO campaign or an organic SEO campaign depends on the nature of your business. If your customers are not bound to a specific location, you’ll probably be better served by organic SEO.

On other hand, if you have a business that provides its services and sells its products in a particular geographical area or a region only, then local SEO is more likely to produce immediate, tangible results.

But if you are looking to grow a local business and want to target a larger market than just your local region, combining local SEO and organic SEO strategies is a wise approach.