Organic SEO Vs Local SEO? – What’s the Difference?

Did you know that over 93% of online experiences begin with search engines? 

Whether people are looking to purchase a product, hire a service or find more about a business, they begin with an online search.

When you want your website to show up in the search results, it must be optimised for the search engines.  That’s where SEO comes into play. In the absence of a solid SEO strategy, you are missing out on a plethora of leads and customers. 

However, an important question remains: should you optimise for organic SEO or local search? What’s the difference between organic SEO and local SEO? We answer these questions in this post. 

Difference Between Local and Organic Search

The primary difference between local and organic search is that local SEO has a geotargeting component. 

When a search user searches for a product + location, the search engines know that the search query has local intent. And in some cases, the search engines assume local intent. The end goal of search engines is to provide search users with accurate results. 

What is Local SEO? 

Local SEO is the process of optimising your company’s online presence to ensure you show up in the local searches. 

Let’s say you are looking to order pizza and you search for pizza delivery in Leeds. 

Google will list local pizza places under the ads section and above the organic results. 

What is Organic SEO?

Organic search is what happens when the search engines determine that a search query does not have local intent. In short, the user is looking for information and not a specific location. 

Organic SEO is a strategy that’s used to increase traffic to your website. SEO covers an array of on-page and off-page techniques that help boost a website’s rankings in the search engine result pages (SERPs). 

So let’s say you want to make pizza at home and not order online. So you search for “pizza recipes”. The search engine will deliver the most relevant websites in answer to your query. 

The search engines rely on hundreds of factors to rank websites and index them in the SERPs including keywords, backlinks, mobile responsiveness, page load speed and more. 

Local SEO or Organic SEO – What Should I Aim for? 

If you operate a brick-and-mortar business and are targeting customers from your locality/region, then you’ll want to focus on ranking in local search. However, if you want your website to show up for specific search terms and not for a location, you’ll want to aim for organic SEO. 

Need help with SEO? LS25 Web Design Leeds can help. Talk to us today!