If your business has multiple physical locations, you may find yourself overwhelmed with how to manage the Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for all of them.
Unlike a single-location company where you have the simple option of channeling all your SEO strategies to one location, you will have to adjust your approach if you have multiple locations or stores.
For example, you my have customer facing shops in different cities or suburbs. With one store, you only have to optimize for that city or area plus your important keywords.
But with more than one, you will have to figure out how to rank for keywords with location modifiers for each one. This may seem daunting or overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be.
Best SEO Strategies for Multi-location Businesses
This next section will delve into Local SEO for multi-location businesses. If you take the right steps, you’ll be able to make it work.
Work with Digital Marketing Agencies
Local SEO can be challenging to understand and manage. To get it moving fast and with minimal issues, consider hiring a digital marketing agency that can bring deep and varied expertise to the table for you.
You’ll find that there are countless options to pick from, both locally and at a national or global level. With the right choice, you should succeed in a much shorter timeframe as opposed to winging it.
As Rilind Elezaj from Tactica says: “SEO experts and SEO agencies study your business and company from every angle. They gather data from all the corners of the industry in order to understand exactly what your customers want and don’t want.”
If SEO is new or confusing to you, take the easy road. Bring in other SEO experts who can help shorten the time to results.
Hire SEO Consulting Services
An SEO consultant who knows their craft should be extra helpful for you, no matter whether your scope is local or national. With the right selection, you stand to benefit from their experiences with other companies and industries.
SEO consultants bring a different skillset to the table than a full digital marketing agency might. Whereas the agency needs to have solid understanding of a range of marketing areas, SEO consultants are specialized in optimizing and ranking websites.
Some consultants will be very expensive, yes, but this is one area where you get what you pay for.
You’ll spend less on big agency overhead like project and account management. Consultants usually handle full service themselves.
So while their hourly or retainer rates may be higher, you should expect to tally less time on items that exist solely manage the workflow instead of delivering measurable business value.
Tailor Each Page or Post to a Specific Location
First, start off by creating separate pages for each and every location you operated. Many websites combine “Locations” into a single page. Don’t do that. You want to have distinct content that can be hyper-targeted by location.
When crafting new material for your website, you should endeavor to make each post or page channel all its SEO focus to one location.
For example, let’s say you sell perfumes in several different locations. If you want to boost sales in London, you should generate a tailored page with outstanding copy focused on buying perfume in London.
In fact, always aim to avoid mixing up multiple locations on an individual URL. Take into account that generalized messaging will often fail to resonate with audiences from all locations.
If your locations are in different countries, you need to ensure the language is understandable for each. You might have to bring in a translation services company for well-translated content.
Get Reviews For Each Individual Location
Reviews can heavily impact your ability to show up for each specific location. If you want to balance it out, you should strive to build reviews for each individual location where you operate.
You can also write about reviews elsewhere and embed keyword + location combinations in that content for added benefit.
This could even help with link building and improving your domain authority. Perhaps another business owner wants to write about how happy they were with your service or staff at a particular storefront.
This is great! Hopefully, they will be willing to blog or otherwise post about it on their own website. And it will be even sweeter if they opt to link to your location page directly!
Always Cite Contact and Location Information Consistently Online
For years, Google has talked about how important it is to get your NAP (Name – Address – Phone) information cleaned up online. You need to have this data represented verbatim across Google My Business and the other major directories for maximum benefit.
This starts with your own website. If you follow the advice to build individual location pages, make sure the NAP data is in the proper format. The format you want to use everywhere else online.
For example, if you say Suite 101 on your location page, don’t use things like “#101” or “Ste. 101” elsewhere. Those are not verbatim to what you say on your own domain and can confuse the local maps algorithms.
This is perhaps the least understood and most frequently botched part of this entire process. A local SEO consultant or agency can help you clean up your listings and synch across the various local directories that Google uses. Don’t hesitate to bring in help on this part.
Conclusion
Some website owners think that the only real option for SEO success is in single-location businesses, but this is not true.
Multiple-location companies can also optimize their online presence for search engines. There is an entire method to making this happen, as we outlined in this post.
Follow these tips, or hire an SEO expert to do it on your behalf. They can help you move the needle faster and without error, so when in doubt, bring in help.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Rebecca Collins
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- What’s the Best SEO Strategy for Multi-Location Businesses? - March 29, 2022
