Managing Local SEO for Multiple Locations

Local SEO refers to the optimization of a website for search engines to increase the visibility and ranking of a given business location in searches for local products or services.

This can be accomplished through optimizing your website's content, keywords, and other elements to conform to commonly-used term variations associated with a product or service.

This includes practices such as mentioning local names, brands, businesses, and addresses on your site that correspond with those used by potential customers searching for your products.

By increasing your site's exposure in local searches, you should also be able to see an increase in traffic from your local area.

Importance of Local SEO

You can see how crucial local search is by looking at the 900 percent spike in "near me" searches and the additional 500 percent increase in searches using the words "can I buy" or "buy."

You might be achieving great results with your SEO strategy , bringing more traffic to your site (and through your doors) every day, but then you decide to open a second location in your area or open a franchise in another state.

Following SEO best practices to distinguish one place from another is what SEO for many locations entails (without compromising your brand). This is how you can make it happen.

Businesses have now woken up to the fact that local search engine marketing is a must. It has been proven that businesses ranking higher in a local search lead to more inquiries, which in turn leads to more customers.

Local SEO is indeed one of the most important aspects of growing your business online, but it can be difficult to keep on top of. We’ve put together a handy little guide to maximize your local SEO strategy and stay ahead of your competitors.

Best Practices for Local SEO for Multiple Locations

SEO for multiple locations is difficult. Some key factors include duplicate content, duplicate ranking, and incorporating local SEO for each of the locations. For example, if you are a national business, then each location will have different names (NAP) in each respective location.

In addition, they all require on-site optimization and may even need separate traffic sources. This adds more difficulty to SEO and optimizing your website properly. So, let’s take a look at what you can do to optimize your website independently per location.

1. Design and Build One Excellent Website

Instead of building out separate websites for each location or warehouse, it makes more sense to create a single central website and then use subdomains for each location.

This is a relatively simple solution that only requires changing the servers in your account to map each sub-domain to the central site (aka primary domain). For example, “yourbusiness.com” becomes “yourbusiness.com/locations/location1.” Looking for all locations? A landing page for “yourbusiness.com/locations” will send you there, with links to each page.

This is a much better way to build your presence as a unified entity rather than having multiple disconnected sites. However, make sure the information given on all the subdomains is consistent with a touch of locality.

2. Create Separate Landing Pages for Each Location

If you have never considered what geo-targeting your specific landing pages to specific locations might do for your website, let me tell you that you are losing visitors.

It is a question of opportunity: if you get traffic from Google searches and they find that there is not a lot of information on the web about the locality, do you know where they will go? They will close the tab!

So, the best way is to create landing pages having consistent but distinct content with local information including address, phone number, etc. That is why SEO companies in Dubai and around the world suggest to create location based landing pages for each of the location your business is operating in.

More specifically, your landing page must have this information:

• • Address
• • Phone number
• • Hours
• • Office staff
• • Google map (embedded for navigation)
• • Promotions or special services at this location
• • Links (i.e., to review sites)

It would be even better to give the landing page a local touch by adding some lines about the area. However, be sure not duplicate content from other landing pages.

Making location-specific metadata, headers, and tags is much easier with Google's structured data markup tool. This on-page SEO tactic aids visitors in finding the location they seek.

Using Schema.org and other structured markup aids helps standardize the way you notate your website, making it easier for Google to crawl (and better for you in terms of search rankings!).

3. Create Separate Google Business Listings

Business owners often think creating a new business listing for each of their locations will simply confuse the search engines and are not worth the effort. This is a mistake.

Start by creating a Google My Business profile for each location, as well as setting up a single-location listing that you can push to all locations.

No matter if the business is the same, each listing offers information that is unique to that location (e.g., hours, phone number, etc.). Updating and enhancing each location's business listing ensures that your consumers have the information they require when searching for you. Make sure each location is included separately in your Google My Business listing.

If you want to post on GMB, you will need a verified and updated business listing. These posts can be about new offers, discounts, and other promotional ones as well.

GMB can prove to be a free promotional tool for your business if you use it effectively enough. The reason is that people are searching for businesses on search engines constantly and when someone searches for any business, Google shows the top-ranked ones, the ones that are optimized, and active on the platform. If you are one of those, you are on the right track.

4. Manage Reviews Properly

Since word of mouth is still the primary source of people finding new small businesses, reviews will continue to be important for local SEO and overall business growth.

Many business owners think that positive reviews will improve their business and negative reviews will cause their business to suffer. Both of these are true — but with one major caveat. It has to do with how you manage your reviews.

A common mistake small business owners make is that they do not think about the importance of managing reviews consistently.

Whether you have hundreds of Google, or Facebook reviews or have just started getting a few from your customers, modern social proof is and can be crucial for your business.

The bottom line is – consistently nurturing your online reputation will improve your brand awareness and reputation online, ultimately resulting in an increase in sales and profits for your business.

It is hard to get reviews online and it is definitely a time taking process but there are a few ways you can use to garner and manage reviews.

• • You can send an email to the customers asking about their experience.
• • You can hand over cards asking for customer experience.
• • You can incentivize the process and give some discounts if someone leaves a review.

Follow either way but be sure to respond to customer reviews as and when they come. That is the main part. You have to be actively responding to the client’s feedback. This shows to potential customers as well that you are considerate, and your customers are being heard.

5. Consistently Create Local Content

Whether you have a new or an old website, content is king and when it comes to local websites, the organization is queen. No matter the situation, you cannot sit on your hands and not create content. Creating content is the foundation of a successful website in any industry.

Your content should be localized and up to date. This includes, but is not limited to blog posts, articles, eBooks, and white papers.

Local content not only helps your website rank on local searches but also gives visitors a feel of your business. A touch of locality compels them to try you out and this is how you win business.

Local SEO for multiple locations is not easy and is not for everyone. However, if you manage to take advantage of it, the rewards are significant.

This is it for today’s blog. I hope you enjoyed reading it and that you learned a thing or two about local SEO. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

If you are a business owner with multiple locations, you do need experts to handle your website’s SEO. Prism Digital, the best SEO Agency in Dubai can help you in this regard. Our SEO experts will devise tailored strategies that would rank your website on local searches, and you would reap the unlimited rewards that come with it.