Australian SEO Consultants v’s Overseas Consultants
SEO Works, (an SEO agency in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney) posted a blog recently titled “What Makes SEO in Australia unique?”
Their blog post offers five reasons why SEO in Australia is not a one-size-fits-all. Their reasons are:
- Keyword Selection – Australian slang, colloquialisms, idioms and more
- Copywriting – Australian culture
- Link Building – Understanding which Link Directories are prominent and meaningful in Australia
- Domain Strategy - Overseas SEO agencies may not be aware of the importance of using a .com.au domain name.
- Hosting – Overseas SEO agencies may not offer hosting in Australia.
You can read their full blog post about the benefits of using an Australian SEO consultant here.
However, the biggest problem of using overseas SEO agencies has been left of this list:
- Too much reliance upon the keyword data and little understanding of Australian geography.
Around 50% of Australian Internet searches include a location in the search term. However, as many towns in Australia have a small population so too does the search volume for these geographic specific keywords. As a result, an overseas SEO consultant may dismiss some relevant keywords as the search volume is too low, even though the keyword is still very relevant and meaningful to the business.
For example:
The search volume (exact) match for the keyword ‘SEO Caloundra’ is approx 12 searches per month, whilst the keyword ‘SEO Brisbane’ is approx 2,400 searches per month.
Now an Australian SEO (particularly an SEO consultant in Brisbane or the Sunshine Coast) would know that even though Caloundra is only an hour drive from Brisbane, a Caloundra address is certainly not a Brisbane address. If somebody is looking for an SEO consultant in Caloundra (which we can safely assume that they are – with the search term ‘SEO Caloundra‘) then this keyword would have a higher conversion rate as it is more relevant to what the searcher is looking for.
The catch here is that if you were optimising a website based in Caloundra, but targeting the keyword ‘seo Brisbane’, you would probably find that the rankings for ‘SEO Caloundra’ would also increase due to the general optimisation efforts. However, (and this is where I really see overseas SEO agencies doing poorly) is that it looks ridiculous to stuff the page titles and headings with Brisbane keywords when the business is not based in Brisbane! On-page optimisation should be helpful for both search engines and people!
Further to this, as Google Local Business listings now occupy most of Google’s first page results it would be a long and expensive process to have Google believe that the SEO agency in Caloundra is more relevant than all of the other SEO agencies with physical addresses in Brisbane.
In summary, if you’re local business in Australia, and you are using an overseas SEO provider instead of a local SEO Consultant, then sometimes you just have to follow your instincts. Keyword search volume is important but it does not always trump the meaning of a word.
