- If you want your business to be seen by real-life customers in the communities where you operate, you need to be focused on local SEO.
- For businesses with multiple locations, it’s generally a good idea for each location to have its own unique page.
- The most important thing to remember about doing local SEO is that being relevant and useful to searchers in each of the areas where you operate is going to result in better rankings.
- As a business owner, it’s highly recommended that you claim your Google My Business profile so that you can ensure the information being presented to people online is accurate.
Many small- and medium-sized business owners are discovering that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be an incredibly valuable tool for attracting new customers. For owners of businesses with multiple locations, this is especially true. If you want your business to be seen by real-life customers in the communities where you operate, you need to be focused on local SEO.
While there’s a lot of general SEO information online about how best to create content, build backlinks, and do keyword research, learning the ins and outs of local SEO for businesses with multiple locations can be a little bit trickier. Because every business is different, it’s important to understand what works and why. At Redefine Marketing Group, we have a lot of experience with local SEO for businesses with multiple locations. If you have any questions about how we can help your business succeed, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
Setting Up Multiple Locations on Your Own Website
The first and most important thing you need to consider when doing local SEO for multiple locations is your own website. Most small- and medium-sized businesses operate with the standard, out-of-the-box website services. While these services get better all the time, it’s still good to customize your website to encourage optimal organic search performance.
A good rule of thumb is that you want to have an individual, unique URL for every function or piece of information on your website. Although it’s tempting to put all of your information on the homepage, because that’s always where you see the most traffic, it’s good to break things out a bit more.
If your business has multiple locations, it’s generally a good idea for each location to have its own unique page. Say, for example, someone owns a chain of restaurants. It’s common for restaurant websites to have a link in the navigation to “Locations” that takes potential customers to a single page that shows all the locations with their addresses and contact information and a few images of the food they serve. While this kind of setup makes sense and is functional, it’s not optimal for search engines. In this example, the opportunity would be to create a unique page for every location with images from that location, reviews of that location from real customers, contact information, etc. Not only are these pages more likely to rank when someone searches for that restaurant in their area, but they’re also more relevant for the people that click through.
The most important thing to remember about doing local SEO for multiple locations is that being relevant and useful to searchers in each of the areas where you operate is going to result in better search engine rankings and performance. By creating individual pages for every one of your locations, regardless of the business, you create more opportunities to rank, create awareness among potential customers, and drive valuable traffic and revenue.
Setting Up Multiple Locations in Google My Business
Another incredibly valuable tool if you want to be successful with local SEO for multiple locations is Google My Business. This Google service enables business owners to spotlight their locations prominently in search engine results.
More often than not, people will search for terms like “plumbers near me” or “electricians in my area” on Google before ever cracking open a phone book, asking their friends, or seeing a commercial on TV. If your business exists, Google has likely already collected some basic information to show in Google Maps or in its search results. Often, this information is sourced from users or discovered by Google as they crawl the internet.
As a business owner, it’s highly recommended that you claim your business and all of its locations so that you can ensure the information being presented to people online is accurate. Managing your own Google My Business account also allows you to post pictures, respond to reviews, and even post local advertisements online. You can create a Google My Business page for each of your locations individually and manage them all with a single account. By creating what’s called a “Location Group,” you can easily make updates, share information, and raise awareness of your business. Google My Business even offers an app to allow you to manage your listings conveniently from your own phone.
Each of your Google My Business listings can also link to your website. If you’ve created individual pages for each of your locations, you can ensure that searchers land on the most relevant page for them. In this way, Google My Business can supplement the optimizations you’ve made on your own website by driving more traffic to optimized, relevant pages, which, in turn, make your Google My Business listing more impactful. This synergy results in more customers and higher conversion rates.
Local SEO Services for Companies Opening a New Location
One important thing to consider is that the more locations you have, the more difficult it can be to manage everything. Although the fundamentals are simple, the implementation can be overwhelming for people who are already busy doing the million other things necessary to run a successful business.
The best solution for doing local SEO for multiple locations, if you want to make sure your website is fully built out and optimal and your Google My Business account is properly set up and accurate, is to work with the experts at Redefine Marketing Group. With local SEO services from Redefine Marketing Group, you can be confident knowing we’ll take every step necessary for your business to succeed.
