For many local companies, deciding where to concentrate their marketing efforts and budget is among the most challenging tasks. Ultimately, it’s an important decision that affects their market visibility and the success of their business. If they make a mistake, competitors lose customers who could be theirs.
At this moment in time, many local companies with a marketing strategy know about SEO and how maximizing it to connect with the local market is essential to success. However, we also recognize that location is the leading information that local searches seek. This presents a particular challenge for businesses that have multiple locations.
Multiple locations mean that you’re trying to reach different audiences. When considering SEO, keep in mind that this is essential. You’ve not widened one large market, but instead, you’ve created a variety of smaller audiences, all requiring identical attention and concentration.
How can singular brands looking to expand in multiple places make the most of local SEO? Let’s look at it.
Create Location Specific Pages
Imagine you’re a local coffee restaurant with three locations within 10 miles. Each site is central, so plenty of people pass through your business. One day, a prospective client wants to meet someone for coffee. They’ve seen your address somewhere but don’t know exactly where. So, they pick up their smartphone and search for your name.
What appears is a page with only one location, and it’s located on the opposite end of town. They might decide to add your website’s URL and then search until they come across the address closest to their home, but why would they? Customers shouldn’t have to look around for you.
However, they forget Starbucks is nearby and search for their hours. Starbucks is locally optimized and includes the hours and addresses of each location independently. It’s a breeze and a win for the big players.
You’re not a threat to the big companies as an individual business. But there’s something to learn from their experience regarding marketing across several locations. Treat each one as a personal distinctive illustration of the brand.
Landing pages are an excellent opportunity to refine your regional SEO strategy by using local keywords, content, and meta information to optimize every landing page so that it appears with different results on the results of a search. That person above who looked up your business might have easily found your address and could have linked to your landing page to know more about the location.
Give Search Engines Something to Chew On
If a business invests the effort to create distinct pages in each store, it’s only natural to expect increased visitors and sales. However, as of now, the overall traffic seems to be declining, and the store down the street with only one location is taking its toll.
The problem and something you need to be wary of is that these pages, all designed for local SEM, have weakened the site and diminished the results of its searches.
Let’s examine the site of a local business with only one place. The game of SEO is highly effective, and they’ve incorporated all the aspects of local SEO to ensure they are ranked with top popularity. The site is targeted and concentrated, resulting in results.
When a site grows to include separate pages for each region, typically, it’s the case that there’s not the same amount of effort put into creating each page with geo-specific content. That means there is not enough that search engines can snoop on. To be successful in local SEO in multiple locales is about making each one as important as the first.
The solution is to create more local SEO-rich content around each page by using the existing URLs for specific locations.
For instance, adding an image gallery specific to each site, adding multiple blog posts, and urging customers to write location-specific reviews on the designated pages.
Reputation Management is More Important Than Ever
As most consumers check online reviews while seeking a local business, monitoring your reputation is vital. This is particularly true when you have many locations. Here are the reasons.
A common mistake multi-location companies make is focusing on the overall quality of their reviews but not enough on the activities at each location. If they’ve done their best by optimizing their site-specific pages to optimize local SEO, then what’s being reported about each place matters.
An organization has received a 4.5-star review for its primary site. They are confident that they’re providing high-quality products and services, allowing their reputation management to slide. However, the one on the opposite side of town appears to be struggling, and a couple of negative reviews have reduced the overall rating for this location to a 3.0.
If they’re most likely planning to visit the less-rated spot, they’ll skip it and not bother going to other locations regardless of how good the reviews are.
The key is to remain at the top of your reputation management and encourage positive feedback on all points. For instance, you could include the CTA for customers to write a review on specific landing pages, send emails asking them to leave reviews on your product or service as a reminder, and perhaps an incentive for purchase receipts.
It’s not just about receiving reviews. Companies must be proactive in responding to reviews so that when something comes up, repairing the damage is a top priority before a single negative review causes all businesses to suffer.
Multiple Solutions for Multi-Location Businesses
Creating a brand through locally-based SEO can be one thing; however, expanding it across multiple sites is entirely different. The strategies discussed here are just the beginning. We’ve not even mentioned Google My Business, managing the citations and links. Local SEO for multiple locations can be an enormous undertaking. However, it’s well worth it.
Innovative businesses know that, at times, hiring the assistance of professional SEO solutions is the best way to take. We’re a prestigious digital marketing company that can assist you in growing your business’s footprint across multiple sites. Local company. Reach out to Knowmad Digital Marketing now to find out more.