Several multi-location businesses have just one master landing page for all their separate locations. This is a big mistake when performing local SEO for small business.
Whether you are running different brick-and-mortar stores or just one store that serves separate business locations, you should create and optimize web pages for each of them.
How Multi-Location SEO Differs
More than 46% of daily Google searches involve looking for local information. As more buyers turn to the internet to search for products within their localities, you cannot overlook the impact of web visibility on your sales. Research shows that up to 18% of local smartphone searches result in actual purchases in less than 24 hours compared to 7% for non-local searches.
Based on these stats, an organization that invests in local SEO will likely generate more revenue from its online traffic. However, things get proportionally more sophisticated if the business serves multiple locations. First, it means you will be using one website for different markets. Second, and most importantly, clients from various locations may have different needs.
So, how do you make sure that your web pages address your customers’ location-based needs to the fullest? How can you ensure that your websites get optimum visibility across all these separate locations? There’s only one way out – you have to optimize local SEO for each business location separately.
The Optimization Methods You Can and Should Use
1.Create Separate Landing Pages for Each Location
Quite often, businesses will have all the information about their different locations on one master landing page. To get the best SEO results, however, each website page should only talk about one thing.
When you build dedicated pages for each business location, you have a higher chance to rank.
Won’t you be having several pages talking about almost the same thing? Is this really necessary? The answer is YES – you should have location-specific web pages.
Do a random Google search for any product/service or for the term you want to rank for and note the first three organic results. You will notice that most of them (if not all) are location specific. So, to get optimum website visibility, you should build landing pages for each of your business locations.
2.Optimize SEO For Each Location Page
Once you have website pages for every business location, you need to optimize them to help Google’s search engine discern what every page talks about. You do this by visiting any of the best free press release sites.
Ensure that each meta description or title tag has a keyword. This way, users can understand what your pages talk about at a glance. You can even include a service description and location in the MD.
You should also make sure that your URL structure is logical, organized, and precise. The easier search engines can decipher your URLs, the higher your chances of ranking. Users should also be able to identify your URL and where it leads by just hovering over it.
For instance, a URL like yourbiz.com/locations/texas/dallas is straightforward and easy to decipher. Users can see at a glance that the URL is for an organization operating in Dallas, Texas.
3.Claim Your Google My Business Listing For Each Location
Google My Business is a service that allows organizations to control how they appear on Google search results and Maps.
Once you’ve created a Google My Business profile for every location, you can add location-specific addresses, contact details, and even service descriptions. The good thing about GMB is that you can manage all your business locations from the same account.
Note that you can only claim GMB listing for physical stores. The GMB guidelines outlaw the claiming of listings for virtual offices unless they’re fully staffed during business hours. Contravention of this provision can attract serious ramifications, including permanent removal of your GMB listing.
4.Manage Your Citations
Google’s search engine algorithm relies on how your business Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) appear across the web to determine how the platform ranks you for local searches.
If your citations are inconsistent, it will derail your local SEO efforts. Inconsistency can be as simple as wrong spellings, misplaced punctuations, or inappropriate annotations.
Therefore, you should continually scour and monitor the web to ensure that every business location’s NAP is consistent. Some of the popular aggregators you can use to look and fix your citations include Yelp, Yellow Pages, Bing Places, Yahoo Local, and Foursquare.
5.Build Links To Your Location Pages
Optimizing backlinks to your websites is probably one of the most common SEO techniques. Now that you’ve built several location-specific web pages, you need to have link-building strategies for each of them.
Here are a Couple of Options to Consider
1.Invest in Content Marketing
The surest way to get traffic to your website is by having quality content. However, as you’re starting, you need first to announce your presence to the local audience. Once you have a considerable amount of blog content within your microsites, you can use paid ads or email/social media marketing to disseminate it. More content pages mean more link-building opportunities.
2.Sponsor Local Events
This doesn’t have to be an event that’s related to your industry. As much as it’s within the business location, you can’t miss mentions and backlinks from local event websites, news outlets, or colleges.
3.Host Events/Meetups
If your digital marketing budget allows, you can occasionally host meetups with industry stakeholders within the business location. Apart from announcing your presence, event hosting will significantly create a buzz about your business. In the process, you can be sure to build a substantial number of backlinks.
Receive Professional Help with Your SEO Efforts
Optimizing local SEO for multiple locations is quite different and more complicated than when you’re dealing with one business location. Somewhere along the way, you will need expert help from a more experienced team of professionals.
BizIQ specializes in helping small businesses like yours optimize their website visibility at reasonable prices. We are also a small business, so we understand your struggles and aspirations to the detail.
