5 Ways for Multi-Location Businesses to Gain Targeted Leads
By Shelby Ballou
Just because your business has multiple physical locations doesn’t mean your search engine rankings will be higher. There’s more to it than that.
When you operate from several locations, it’s important to customize your local SEO campaigns. For businesses with multiple locations, drafting, implementing and evaluating separate local marketing strategies is the most challenging part.
Having to cater to both local and national audiences can be difficult. So, what can be done?
Here’s how you can maximize your local business visibility across all the markets you serve.
Use a single domain with multiple subdomains.
In order to rank well, make sure each of your business locations has a separate web page.
As you can imagine, managing 50+ websites together would be extremely time-consuming and hectic. Also, these multiple domains would be indexed separately, so your SEO efforts would not be compounded. If you have 50+ business locations, here’s a practical solution. Instead of having a separate domain for each of your locations, use a subdomain or subfolder under a single domain. This will help you create a stronger brand and will save you valuable time.
Here’s an example: Create a location-specific directory (www.example.com/cityname/page-1) or subdomain (city.example.com) and incorporate fresh, unique, location-based content.
Create optimized content for each individual location.
One of the keys to ranking well is creating unique content optimized individually for each location.
Having geo-specific content means you can individually optimize title tags, heading tags, meta description tags, and links on each web page. Make sure the content for each location page is unique and engaging!
In addition, be sure to add/change various details: reviews, hours of operations, payment options, directions, and testimonials for each location.
Use Google+ local.
Google+ local is a powerful tool that expands the online visibility of your local business, especially when used in combination with Yelp and Foursquare.
Google+ local allows you to create a unique business listing with a phone number, with each location as an individual entity. Every post on a page recieves a separate URL, which can potentially get its own search engine rank.
Because these listings are intricately integrated with Google search results, expect to get higher visibility with your local audience.
Get listed on all the important directories.
Citations empower local SEO. In order to get all your business locations ranked, it’s important that you are cited across the web consistently and accurately. A large portion of people depend on directories to find local businesses.
These directories perform better in organic results and drive a lot of traffic. So even if your business is having a hard time ranking for a specific keyword, it can easily reach potential customers through these directories.
To get started, target the national directories (Google Places, Bing Places, Yelp, Foursquare), then get listed in industry specific directories (like Tripadvisor), and then locally relevant directories (like the Chamber of Commerce).
Perform frequent SEO audits.
An SEO audit is necessary to keep track of your website’s status.
To begin, make a list of some keywords for which you want to rank and search for each of them. See which position you hold in the search results for each keyword.
Here are a few important things you should check on your homepage while performing an SEO audit.
- Do not have a redirecting homepage
- The business name, phone number, city, and street address should be clearly visible on your homepage.
- Have a business logo that reflects the value of your business.
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
- The navigation links on the homepage are crawlable.
Use Schema.org to increase click-through rate.
Structured data marks up your web content with special tags, through which search engines gain additional information about a business and displays them in search results.
Usually, organic results show page title, URL, and a small description that is taken from the website’s metadata. With Schema.org, you can expand this information to include other details including hours of operation, reviews, ratings, pricing, and so on. This increases click-through rate.
Conclusion
The only way to get all your locations ranked is by treating each location as an individual entity. You don’t have to distribute your marketing efforts across all of them. Instead, try to create customized strategies for each local market.
