Local Search Made Simple for a Multi-Location Businesses

If you have more than one business location, it can be difficult to optimize your site for local search. Doing so is essential for your organic marketing campaign and for being found when and where a customer needs you.

For example, if you only have a local business listing for your original location, you could be missing out on all of the consumers you are trying to target in the other areas. It is no easy task to get multiple, if not hundreds of locations to rank high on a local search. You can use a third party to help you accomplish this or try it on your own with these suggestions:

Create Local Landing Pages

If you want to rank in a local search for each location, this can be extremely difficult to do if you only have one website. A simple solution is having a unique landing page created for each location. This is an easy way to improve your organic marketing because you can use them when creating your local business listings and optimize each one with location specific keywords. Make sure that your name, address, and phone number are clearly listed on the landing pages and that your phone number is optimized for click-to-call in order to capture mobile users. You should also embed a location specific Google map so that people can easily click for directions. Make sure that your title tags also include your business name and location.

When building your local landing pages make sure that you personalize it by changing the content of your page, referencing the local area, and including pictures that make the page personal. For example, you could upload images of the staff at that location or known landmarks that represent the city. If you do this, you should decrease your bounce rate. You can also ask your web developer to personalize the URL with the city and state so that it is even easier for the page to come up in a local search.

Create Citations

If you haven’t used citations yet, it is time to get started. In the SEO world, this is when your company information is mentioned on another site. For example, if you create a listing for each location on Open Table or Yelp, this would be building a citation. Each of your locations needs to have them, and they should include your name, address, phone number and the URL of your landing page. This will help with your organic marketing because consumers frequently use review sites in order to find information about a business or service when they are looking to make a buying decision.

Citations can include but should not replace, local business listings. You need to list each of your locations with Google, Yelp and other local listing services. This way you can come up in a local search on a desktop and a mobile phone. For example, being listed with Google will allow the user to pull up your location information when doing a search for your business type on Google Maps.

Depending on how many locations you have, this process can be time consuming at best. It is, however, well worth it because people can’t give you business if they don’t know where to find you.