Do you have a business that serves clients from multiple locations?
Serving customers from different local areas can be beneficial for most business owners.
Some of these benefits are the opportunity to rank for more local keywords, increase brand awareness, and drive more sales.
Preparing a multi-location SEO strategy can be hard, due to keyword volume and competition. Each year more local businesses come to life, which means ranking for local keywords will become hard.
Especially with the Google Search standards and algorithm updates, going to the top without a strategy would not end up in your favor.
To help you climb rankings more efficiently, and concrete your local business at the top of the SERPs, we have outlined 12 tips to optimize Local SEO for multiple locations that you can follow for better results.
What is multiple-location SEO?
Multiple-location SEO is a strategy used to optimize your businesses for more than one location. Locations can be within a city or spread throughout a whole country.
The purpose of multi-location SEO is to craft a winning strategy that will be applied to all business location pages on a website with the idea of ranking each location for the Google local pack.
Multi-location SEO is the perfect solution for business owners who have more than one local area served or simply wish to expand their business into multiple branches.
Creating a multiple-location business helps with brand recognition, and can help local customers get relevant information regarding nearby outlets.
Why is SEO for multiple locations important?
When growing your online presence, local SEO can help your business show up for multiple desired locations, and let any local audience in your locally targeted area find you easily.
By just including your business’s local address for each location, you are telling search engines the exact locations to rank.
Including each location’s address a multiple-location business can see:
- High increase in physical store visits.
- Appear in the top search for “near me” location searches.
- Boost reputation and engagement rates.
- Attract local blogs and news websites, turning your business into a greater customer source.
Nowadays local searches are more important than you might think. Researches show that 78% of consumers use the Internet to find local businesses, and services at least once a week.
Even small location businesses can receive multiple sales by optimizing their local area target traffic.
Benefits of SEO for Multiple Locations
Multiple-location SEO is a great way to increase sales and increase profits with small investments. Here are 5 benefits of multiple-location SEO that can help your business.
1. Boost Local Marketing Rankings
Having a multi-location business can bring a tremendous boost to your local SEO strategy.
Search engines like Google offer location-based data, which holds information about your business, exact addresses, business images, and more.
By collecting such data from your business, Google can easily navigate local clients toward your business location through Google Maps and display a “Street View” of your business to them.
Not to mention the opportunity of ranking for “near me” searches in multiple local areas. People who search for a local term like “McDonald’s near me” can easily find their fast food restaurant’s location.
2. Attract more local customers
With a good multiple-location SEO strategy, more customers in your target areas can easily find your business through a wide variety of searches.
Nowadays search engines understand the intent of the searcher. So when someone types “cheap gaming mouse Georgia”, multiple stores will be shown. However, the nearest stores will take top places in Google Maps, because nearby customers will always visit the nearest shops.
After a customer has visited a shop, they conduct thorough research online, meaning they are interested in purchasing the product you are offering.
If your website can get on top of the searches, where it can attract most of the clicks, chances of receiving more purchases are greatly increased.
3. Improve brand awareness
Multiple-location SEO can help raise the brand awareness of your business, which leads to more sales, and traffic to your product or services pages.
Opening a new branch in a local area can potentially help customers find your products or services in their area, giving you a chance to appear more frequently in searches.
The more frequently you appear in the local search results, the more frequent sales your business will be receiving, gaining your site more trust, and increasing the chances of being their first choice for a product or service.
4. Get recommended by local customers
Scaling for multiple business locations can attract many local customers who can easily recommend your business to relatives, friends, and online forums.
These customers can tremendously impact your business growth, by improving sales and automating the process of making purchases.
Word of mouth, for example, is one of the easiest ways to earn potential customers without doing anything. Your existing purchasers promote your business, while you you follow best practices to improve your local search.
12 Tips for Multiple Location SEO business success
1. Use a single domain for all locations
Operating a business in multiple locations may encourage you to create domains for various locations, where your business is located. However, managing multiple domains and content may end in the wrong direction, making your local SEO strategy weak against competitors.
By creating specialized categories for each of your locations, content is managed easily, and all incoming links will naturally flow around your whole website.
Whether you are offering multiple or single services, adding all of them under one domain, can give a slight boost to your website’s authority, and improve the overall strategy.
If you want to manage all locations separately, the easiest way would be through a subdomain. This way all locations can target specific geographical locations, and still preserve your link juice.
2. Create a page for each location on your website
Search engines cannot understand if your page is for a certain location. We must optimize the pages, by including their local areas.
For best practices, the specific location should be included in the title, meta description, and URL structure of the page you are creating.
The title should include all keywords, which your service provides, and the location at the end. The URL can contain the keyword and location only, without other words.
Keeping your URLs shorter is easier to read, and improves the user experience when searchers view your website.
3. Create localized content for each location
After the creation of local area pages, the next important thing is to create localized content for products and services, offered for each location.
By providing visitors with available services for their locations, a business owner would prevent confusion, and maintain a positive user flow.
To optimize local SEO for multiple locations, a business page should include:
– Store location: Each page should have its information containing the address of your physical store, which is easy to find, and can be visited at any time. For optimal results, including business hours, contact numbers, and email addresses could potentially boost your trust and bring more visitors.
– Images: Add relevant images to your business location, and include photos showing the inside of your outlet. Make sure to add alternative tags to images, which can rank your business for image SERPs.
– Product pages: Add any relevant to the location products, and exclude those, which are not offered, to avoid confusion.
– Location services: Describe all services that your business offers for a particular location.
– Blog posts: Create relevant to the services local publications by answering queries, or making lists, with information specific to that location. These blog posts can be linked to your services directly, boosting your strategy, and leading customers directly to your services pages.
– FAQ: Including FAQs in your local pages with frequently asked questions, can directly provide your visitors with an answer, which increases trust and helps conversions.
With these small tips, your local customers can find all the information they need, helping them to make a decision and purchase from you directly.
4. Avoid duplicate content
Nowadays duplicate content applies to local SEO as well. Since the Google Helpful Content update has launched, many local businesses started falling from the top of the SERPs.
A reason for that is having duplicate content across all pages. Even though they have a different location set, and offer the same services, Google and other search engines did not wish to continue promoting content.
As a good Local SEO practice, each location should have its unique content, which delivers the same message, but with a different structure, and wording.
Spinning or rephrasing content for the sake of avoiding rewriting all pages would still result in traffic losses.
5. Add Schema and structured markup to each page
Once all pages have their local areas tagged in the titles, slugs, and content, it’s a good practice to include schema markup and structured data for your business and hours.
Schema markup allows for accurately describing content to search engines, increasing the chances of ranking your content higher in the SERPs.
To generate schema markup, you can visit Schema.org and choose the correct markup for each of your pages.
After the markups have been placed, using the Google structured data testing tool can test if everything has been applied correctly, to ensure your local SEO strategy will not go downhill in the future.
6. Keep citations consistent
When listing your business in online directories, it is important to use the correct business name, address, and phone number (NAP) to avoid further issues.
As a good practice, you can use Google Maps or your postal address to acquire the exact location, which will then be displayed in local directories, helping visitors find your business.
Citations can also help grow your Google Business Profile, making it appear more often in the maps section, and help you build local backlinks.
7. Sign up for Google Business Profile (GBP)
Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) is a must for local and international businesses.
It helps you create your profile for your business, and list all the relevant information, which visitors can read and visit your outlet.
Google My Business listings pages include physical location addresses, map pins, information about the company, images, and reviews.
For multi-location businesses, it can be a great way to attract people who are actively searching for nearby locations, services for specific areas, or even popular outlets.
Any multiple-location business can add up to 30 different locations served.
8. Encourage local customer reviews
Encouraging customers to leave reviews on your Google Business Profile is another great way to increase the growth of your multiple-location business.
The more reviews a business gets, the bigger awareness it will raise, meaning more searchers will get to see the products or services a business has to offer.
And with Google Business Profile’s special review feature, searchers can filter results based on reviews. Aside from GBP, you can also register for local business review websites.
Asking visitors to leave reviews on your business can be critical, especially if they are positive reviews, which cost you nothing, and can continuously build a good user experience.
To encourage more local buyers to review your website, you can send them personalized emails, asking for their feedback.
This way you are going to gain knowledge on how your website is performing and seek ways of improving negative sectors.
9. Showcase reviews on your website
Before purchasing a product or service, consumers always compare reviews and make their decisions based on them.
As per Investp, 88% of consumers trust online reviews, as much as recommendations, meaning that positive reviews can have a high impact on your business.
Anywhere from 3 to 5-star average reviews on a local website, can increase clicks and purchases by at least 17%.
To make your business more relevant, and entice people to leave reviews, or simply encourage clicks on your website, showcasing your reviews can be beneficial for any business.
10. Create local business listings for each location
Similar to Google Business Profile, site owners can sign up and create local business listings on websites, such as Yelp, YellowPages, or even Angie.
Listings serve the same purpose as GBP and require the same information about your business, such as your name, address, and phone number (NAP).
Local business listing websites allow clients to leave reviews under your listing, which can boost your overall results, and boost your strategy.
Google often crawls listing websites, searching for information regarding a business, registered in GBP. Once it finds the relevant information on a website, Google performs a comparison between information and positions GBP listings accordingly.
Listings are also used for building strong local citations, helping Google Business Profiles to appear in search results.
On top of that, a local business listing provides the option to link your business inside the listing created, which means you can get a link from the business listing to your local area.
11. Perform a competitor research
If you want to boost your local SEO strategy for multiple locations, track your competitors and review how they got at the top search results.
Spying on a specific business is one of the most effective strategies to improve your local SEO strategy.
By spying on them, you will gain knowledge of how they are performing in the SERPs, who is linking to them, and what are their strengths or weaknesses.
To perform competitor research, you can start using SEO tools, such as Ubersuggest or Semrush, and conduct a competitor analysis, gaining potential information on how your competitors are performing in the local SERPs.
The benefits of SEO tools are many and will help you analyze gaps in keywords, listings, or even mistakes, making your website better than competitors, and rewarding you with better rankings.
12. Create a Social Media presence
Bringing brand awareness to newer businesses can be a tough task, especially when not promoting in the right places. By that, I mean social media.
Websites like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others are presented as social media sites, where you can create your business page or profile, and then start searching for your target audience.
Registering for some of these social media websites, and posting on a regular schedule, can help you achieve more followers, and increase the reach of potential buyers.
And the best thing about social media sites is that you don’t need to pay for advertising or build local traffic, because your target audience is already present there.
Statistics show that more than 74% of the world is using social media in their daily routines, whether they are browsing through posts, groups, or product pages.
On top of that, more than 40% of the businesses in India have a social media presence and receive huge marketing growth by just posting regularly.
Getting your business present on sites like TikTok (if your target audience is teenagers), or YouTube (the 2nd largest search engine), can massively improve your local SEO campaign.
Conclusion
Improving your local business can be a tough task, however, our local SEO tips applied to each location can help you grow, and reach more potential customers. As there is no one-fit solution for all businesses, following these best SEO practices can improve your strategy, and help you appear in more local searches.
With these local SEO tips, your business should start ranking in a matter of time. However, the time it takes to rank for a location can be different, as it depends on competition and relevancy.
If you require professional assistance for growing your website organically, you can contact us to receive local SEO services for your local business.