Local SEO vs SEO: the difference, and which one your business actually needs

“Do I need SEO or local SEO?” is the question we hear most from Australian business owners, usually after two agencies gave two different answers. The honest answer is short: if your customers come from a place, you need local SEO, and the general kind sits on top of it if you ever need it. This article explains what each one ranks for, where the results show up, what the work is, and how to tell which one you need, using the suburb sites we run ourselves as the examples.

What SEO ranks for

Search engine optimisation, in Google’s own starter guide, is about helping Google understand and present your pages for the searches they answer. The classic version is for searches that mean the same thing wherever they are typed: “how to fix a leaking tap”, “best cordless drill”, “what is a safety switch”. The results are the same in Perth and Hobart. The work is content (pages and articles that answer the search better than the rest), technical health (speed, crawlability, structure) and links from sites that Google trusts. It is a national or global contest, and the pages that win are usually the most thorough on the topic.

What local SEO ranks for

Local SEO is for searches whose answer depends on where the searcher is: “plumber Marrickville”, “dentist near me”, “emergency electrician”, “physio Chatswood”. Google answers those two ways: the map results (the “local pack” of three businesses with a map) and the organic results, both filtered to the searcher’s area. Google documents its local ranking as three things: relevance (does the business do what was searched), distance (how far it is from the searcher or the place named) and prominence (how well known it is, from reviews, links and mentions).

So the work is different. On top of the technical health both share, local SEO adds the Google Business Profile (categories, service areas, hours, photos, reviews), a page per service and a real page per suburb or region on your own site, listings in directories with an identical name, phone and address, reviews collected steadily, and links from local sources. The local SEO ranking factors article goes through each.

Side by side

	SEO	Local SEO
Searches	Same answer everywhere	Depend on where the searcher is
Results	Organic list	Map pack plus organic, filtered to the area
Who you compete with	Every site on the topic	Businesses in the same suburbs
Core work	Content, technical, links	Profile, service and suburb pages, listings, reviews, local links
Unit of work	The topic	The suburb
Time to first positions	Months to years for competitive topics	Two to six months by city size
Who needs it	Online sellers, publishers, national brands	Anyone who serves customers in a place

Which one your business needs

Local first if customers come to you or you go to them: tradies, clinics, dentists, physios, lawyers with a local practice, cafés, salons, mechanics, cleaners, removalists. Your competition is a suburb away, and a page about your suburb beats a national article about your trade. The what businesses need local SEO the most article ranks the types.

General first if you sell to the whole country: an online store, a software product, a publication, a brand people search for by name. Your competition is national, and the work is content and authority.

Both, in that order, for a local business with something worth ranking nationally: a builder who writes the clearest guide to a council’s granny-flat rules, a clinic with the best explanation of a procedure. The local work brings the customers; the national piece brings links and reputation that feed back into prominence.

The parts they share

Both need a site that loads fast on a phone, pages Google can crawl, titles that match the search, structured data, and content written for a person rather than a keyword density. Both are hurt by the same shortcuts: bought links, copied pages, a fake address, reviews that are not real. Which is why a site built properly for local SEO is already most of the way to general SEO if you ever want it; the suburb pages become the local layer, and articles become the national layer on top.

What “local SEO” should not mean

It should not mean a monthly fee for “citations” and nothing else, a hundred suburb pages generated from a template, or a promise of the map pack in a fortnight. Google filters template pages as doorway pages, removes fake addresses, and ranks the map on signals that take months to build. If a proposal does not name the suburbs it will build pages for and the service pages it will write, it is selling a package, not local SEO.

Where to start

If you serve a place, start with the Local SEO services page, which explains the plan by city size, or with the free audit: where you rank for your top five searches suburb by suburb, which pages you are missing, how fast the site is on a real phone, and whether your listings match. In writing, within two business days. If you sell nationally, say so in the audit form and we will tell you honestly whether local is the right place to begin.