Local SEO is one of the most effective tools for small businesses to target and attract members of a local audience that are ready to become real, paying customers. When you’re just one location in one town, optimizing local SEO to your advantage is piece of cake, well almost. But what happens when you’re ready to grow beyond one location or maybe even branch out into another city? What then?
The good news is that while optimizing local SEO for multiple locations is more complex, it is entirely possible. With a little bit of work and a few adaptations, you can generate more traffic and make sure potential customers have all the right information about your business – for every location.
Focus on Google My Business
If you haven’t already done so, one of the most important steps you can take for local SEO is claiming and completing your Google My Business (GMB) page. GMB makes it easy to create listings for individual businesses but you need to keep a few things in mind. Don’t want to worry about your GMB listing? JLB can help!
For starters, accuracy is important. You’ll want to make sure that your business name is consistent across all entries, meaning you don’t want to differentiate your name based on location. For example, if your business is Smith Services, listing yourself as Smith Services Baltimore of Smith Services Towson gets the thumbs down from Google.
Create Location-Based Web Pages
It’s possible that you’ve heard a bit of controversy surrounding the use of location-based web pages. This all stems from Google’s algorithm not looking too fondly upon multiple pages with similar or duplicate content. You don’t need to worry about this because that’s not how you should be optimizing your location based pages anyway.
It’s actually extremely helpful to local search engine optimization to have separate dedicated pages for each of your locations rather than piling all the information onto one main landing or home page. The key to local SEO success with this approach is differentiation.
Each dedicated page should include the basics like the location’s name, address and phone number (NAP), but you also want to tailor the content on each page to a location-specific audience. For example, create content built around that specific community and include reviews and testimonials for that location only rather than for your brand in general.
Develop a Location Specific Backlink Strategy
Quality backlinks are an important element of search engine optimization and acquiring them can be one of the most challenging tasks of SEO. When you’re trying to build backlinks for more than one local business, the task becomes exponentially more time-consuming.
Trust that those quality backlinks are worth the time and that each independent location page needs to have its own unique links. The best way of accomplishing this is by making yourself known in the community. Connect with local influencers, engage on local social media pages, get involved with or sponsor a community event to earn the high-quality backlinks that fuel local SEO.
Are you a growing small business that’s looking at expanding beyond one location? Multi-location businesses need specialized local SEO services and we can help. We’re the full-service SEO agency that knows how to generate results with local search engine optimization.
