What You Need to Know
Many people think of search engine optimization as a large subject with one simple goal in mind; to increase the search engine rankings of a business. The truth from the above is that yes, SEO does aim to increase the search engine rankings of a business, but it isn’t a general subject matter at all. In fact, there are two main types of search engine optimization. The one, which is right for your business is going to depend on where you offer your services or products.
The two main types of SEO are local SEO and national SEO. As you may have already guessed, both of these are very different from each other but both do exactly what they say “on the box”. Essentially, local SEO targets a small area such as ‘Red Shoes Springfield Centre’ or ‘Red Shoes Springfield Missouri’ and national SEO targets a larger area such as ‘Red Shoes Springfield Missouri’ or ‘Red Shoes in United States’. As you can see, these keywords are completely different from one another, with national results returning a higher volume of searches and the competition generally also being much higher.

National SEO
When a business offers services that cover all of or the majority of the US they will need national SEO as part of their online marketing strategy. In general, national SEO campaigns can take anywhere from a few months to over a year in order to attain even marginal results.
As part of a national SEO campaign, an SEO company will take your website and make changes to it in order to make it as appetizing as possible for Google to rank it for your keywords. This will include page title changes, Meta description changes, Meta keyword changes; H1, H2, H3 and H4 tag changes and content changes so that all web pages have a solid keyword density. These changes are part of on-page optimization (which is essential) for any worthy SEO campaign.
Often times, a company (such as Oursmartweb) will also find website development problems with a website, such as multiple versions of a home page and broken links. In this case, we will recommend changes on your website to be done by your web developer.
Once a website is developed and built in such a way that it is optimized for the search engines, Oursmartweb will then begin building links to your website which mention your keywords. Currently, there are many accurate ways for a website to attain really powerful backlinks from reliable and related sources.
The price of a national SEO campaign will depend on a few factors; first of all are the amount of keywords you are targeting, second of all is how competitive those keywords are and thirdly is how much real work is going to have to be inputted in order to get your website ranked. As you may or may not already know, national SEO can cost from a few hundred dollars up to thousands of dollars per month.

Local SEO
Local SEO is much easier to wrap your head around than a national SEO campaign. In general, a local SEO campaign will involve getting your website listed on Google Places in order to rank for keywords which mention a location. For an example of this, simply search Google for ‘restaurant location’ (changing location with your own town or city). This will return a list of search results on a map labelled A, B, C, D, E etc, and the main aim of local SEO is to get your business on that map for as many location based keywords as possible.
Of course, traditional SEO as touched upon within national SEO where you build links to a website under keyword terms can also get your website included in the search results for local keywords. Building links to a website under the keywords ‘Caribbean Restaurant Springfield’ for example could in time grab you a top spot organic listing below Google Places listings, however this is in fact much harder than simply getting your business website a Google Places page.

In conclusion, every company is going to have a different and customizable need. At Oursmartweb, it is my passionate goal to find the most precise SEO campaign for your company/website. As with national SEO, local SEO will also involve on-page optimization of a website. This is so that Google can pin point exactly what relevance your website and service has to a specific searcher. Without on-page optimization, your site will not mean a thing to Google or any of the other relevant search engines.