Multi Location SEO

Google Search algorithms are designed to return the most relevant results possible. A great way to improve your Google organic search visibility is with a thoughtful, strategic SEO strategy.

To do this, you’ll need to think beyond one location and into multiple locations. This is known as multi-location SEO or cross-marketing your website across different markets. To succeed at multi-location SEO, you’ll need an integrated approach that combines inbound marketing with digital marketing tactics.

What is Multi Location SEO

Multi-location SEO is the practice of optimising your site for multiple locations. This could be for multiple cities, counties, or even countries. Multi-location SEO is often used by businesses that operate multiple physical locations, such as restaurants or retail stores. To be visible to users searching for your products or services in other locations, you’ll need to optimise your website for those locations too. That’s where multi-location SEO comes in. Multi-location SEO is a crucial part of growing your online presence as a local business. Google gives preference to websites that are relevant to the user’s search. The best way to show that your website is relevant to the user is to focus on the locations your business serves.

Why Is Multi-Location SEO Important

Businesses can gain a lot of advantages from optimising their site for multi-location search. This is because it can improve your authority and helps build trust with your customers, if you can optimise it correctly. So, if you’re a small business that’s just getting started, you might have a hard time convincing users that you’re trustworthy or established. 

A multi-location SEO strategy can help you become more visible online and ready to serve customers. So if your prospective customers can find your site easily, they’ll be more likely to buy from you. 

With a multi-location SEO strategy, your site will be more likely to show up at the top of search results for a wider range of search queries. Also, this can increase your click through rate, especially if the customer clicks through and find what they’re looking for. And in-turn your conversion rate will increase.

With multi-location SEO, you’re more likely to increase your revenue, profit and boost your sales.

How To Optimise Your Content For Multiple Locations

If you’re a business with multiple physical locations, achieving multi-location SEO can be a bit of a challenge. The challenge is that you need to optimise each page for local SEO without running the risk of duplicated content.

The main central website content needs to be optimised for each location. This will support your goal of ranking locally for location-based keyword.

An example of this could be:

Main Website – www.yourdomain.com 

Then from your main website, you can create your location pages with related content relative to that specific location. So your URL structure will look something like this.

www.yourdomain.com/location-a

www.yourdomain.com/location-b

www.yourdomain.com/location-c

Each location needs unique content. This will include your body content, title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags and more. Also you might add local business schema, so more information will appear in the search results about your business. Finally, you will need to include each location in your sitemap and submit this to Google.

As you can see there is a lot of effort in optimising your business websites especially if you have multiple locations across the country. Also, you need to have SEO knowledge to do this. 

Fortunately, we have broken down each step for you so you can go about achieving multi-location SEO. Here are some of the most common methods. 

Optimise Your Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Your title tag should be 50-60 characters long, or you can optimise it based on its pixel width. The title tag should include the targeted location keyword phrase, the article/page title, and company name. 

Ideally, the meta description should have around 156 characters. It’s important to make sure to include your targeted location keyword phrase in the meta description. It must be noted that including any keywords in your meta descriptions, won’t directly improve rankings. But it can entice click-through rates which can improve your SEO.

To grab the users attention your meta descriptions should include relevant keywords. You could also include your local phone to encourage users to call your business using their mobile device when they are on the go. More So you add emojis to make your listing stand out and grab people’s attention  

An optimally optimised title tag structure & Meta Description for most sites can look like this:

Company Name | Article Title | Local keyword phrase

 

Local Schema Markup 

Although adding Local Schema Markup isn’t directly a ranking factor, there is evidence that it is known to improve click-through rates. For example, if someone searches for “best Manchester restaurants”, the users may see a carousel of businesses related to the query. Adding Local Schema Business you can give more information to Google about your business such, as opening and closing hours. So the more information a user sees about their queries they are more likely to click through to your site or book directly with you. Adding Local Schema Markup is another chink in the armour to optimise your localised businesses.  

If you want to add Local Schema Markup to your site using this Google Local Business resource.

 

Targeted Keywords in the H1 Heading Tags

H1 Heading Tags are important for multi-location businesses. Having a high-quality H1 header tag with your local targeted keyword phrase does help Google to understand the page. More so headers help structure the page so, in turn, it guides the user through each section of your content.

Naturally Use Keywords 

It’s important to naturally optimise your content for localised searches. Also its essential to not keyword stuff your pages with your location or targeted keyword. In the past, this was acceptable but Google updates put a stop to this. But, it is still important to include local keyword phrases for your business page for SEO.   

If you have multiple pages dedicated to multiple destinations, you will need to adapt your location pages to suit each of those locations. If you have many hotels across Greater Manchester in different locations, you will need to optimise each location individually. For example, if you’re trying to optimise your hotel in a specific area like “Manchester”, then you want to optimise your page based on that location. In contrast, if the hotel is in Bolton, then you want to optimise that page for that location base keyword. 

Unique Content For Each Location

An important rule when it comes to multi-page optimisation for each location is not to duplicate it with the same location. You should always optimise each page with unique optimised content. So you have the best chance to rank for each location-based search query. Furthermore, optimising each page for each location will reduce the risk of receiving a penalty from Google. In the past, you could get away with duplicate content but the Google Panda update put a stop to this.

As an example, if you have multiple hotels across the United Kingdom it would be easy to duplicate each location with the same content. In contrast, you should create content that is location specific. To do so you should talk about the things to do in the particular location, such as famous landmarks near the hotel or places to eat near the hotel. This way you are providing valuable information to the users. In addition you are optimising each destination with location-specific keywords.

Content Length

When optimising your localised content it’s important to consider the length. The length of the article can be important to SEO as longer articles tend to do better than shorter articles in Search Engines. This may not always be the case as short articles might be better for a particular audience. However, before you consider writing it’s important to do an SEO competitor analysis. So this will give you a gauge of many words you should write and more importantly how to add more value to your content. 

To add more value to the local competitors you can:

• Add more words that provide more value
• Add video content
• Add infographics
• Add better quality images to your content
• Link to better-trusted resources 
• Add more personalised content 

These are several pointers when it comes to developing content for your local SEO strategy.

Local SEO Audit 

If you have already implemented an SEO local strategy, then it’s important to ensure that you are maximising by conducting an SEO Audit. By implementing an SEO audit you can see which areas to improve and strengthen. Improving on your website’s weaknesses might give you the edge over competitors and boost foot traffic to your business. For example, doing a local audit, you might find out that your address is not updated and who has several different addresses that do not match. This is a big no-no when it comes to local SEO. But it’s important to consistently have the same address across the web, so customers and Google trust your business. 

In addition to this, you might find that your Google Business is not up to date with all the important information like opening and closing times. Finally, are you maximising all opportunities across Bing local and Yahoo local? Bing and Yahoo allow you to use their Google Business equivalent so make sure you are taking advantage of them. These are some of the factors you need to look out for when doing a local SEO Audit.

Create A Website That Google & Users Trust

Google uses many different signals to determine the overall quality of a website. One quality guideline that they use to decide this is something called E-A-T. This stands for Expertise, authority, and trust. To meet Google E-A-T standards there are things you need to do which will help optimise your website for local SEO.

1. Build Local Links – Using directories can help improve authority and trust in your website. When submitting your business name and address, ensure you always have the same format address as it helps Google to understand it’s the same business.
2. Create local content – Creating local content shows that you are an expert in your field. Therefore users can go to your website and use it as a trusted resource.
3. Business Reviews – Gaining lots of positive reviews on Google Business will help build your business authority and trust. Even if you receive a negative review, make sure to respond which will show that you care about the customer’s experience. As a result, you take on the feedback and improve next time.

Use Local SEO Tools

Several SEO tools will help you with your local SEO strategy including Yext and BrightLocal. BrightLocal is one of our personal favourites that we use. BrightLocal gives you the tools to rank higher. It helps to improve your reputation, and generate more traffic and leads from local searches. Also, BrightLocal provides a range of tools that will help you maximise your local SEO strategy. The software includes rank tracking tools, local SEO audits, reporting and much more.

Create a Localised Content and Link Building Strategy

This is an important part of ranking for the keywords that your business wants to rank for. The initial step is to understand what your primary and secondary keywords are. Once you know what keywords you need to target, undertake an SEO competitor analysis. This will help to understand what your competitors are doing in terms of content and link building. Doing this you will be able to find gems that you can after. For example, you will be able to find your competitor’s broken links, best-linked pages, top keywords and much more. And then you can begin to formulate a data-backed link-building and content strategy.

An example of this could be a broken link strategy. For example, your competitor could have created a great piece of content that has attracted lots of links. However, your page is now broken so it allows you to steal the links from your competitors. In this case, you will need to find out what content it was and you can use this by using waynackmachine.com. Then create something better and similar and reach out to the website that is linking to the broken competitor’s page. With some luck, you might get some quick wins. 

This shows some of the benefits of creating solid localised content and a link-building strategy.

Off-Page SEO

If you have done all that you can to optimise the on-page SEO, analyse your off-page SEO by doing an off-page audit. Look at what links are pointing to your site to see if they might be harming your rankings and whether you need to improve the quality of the links. 

Stick To Your Strategy

Implementing a local SEO strategy is difficult. It can take a lot of time and resources until you start seeing the results pay off. But with consistency and perseverance, you should start seeing the results that will benefit your business. 

If you are unable to dedicate your time or have a lack of resources, Pixel8 can help you create a winning localised SEO strategy. Contact us today for a free 15-minute consultation to see if we can work together to bring the results you need.

Multi-Location SEO Overview

• Keep it consistent: Remember to use consistent keywords and keyword phrases across all your locations. This will help Google know that your business is the same, even though you’re marketing in different locations.
• Don’t go overboard: Google has a threshold for how many locations a business can appear in at once. If you’re a multi-location business, don’t try to add every location to your central website. Google will flag your website for spam and your entire website could be shut down. 
• Keep your addresses updated: Always remember to keep your business addresses up to date across all of your digital channels. If a user searches for your business using an out-of-date address, your website won’t rank for that keyword.
• Make sure that all your addresses are correct: If you have multiple locations, you’ll want to make sure that all of the addresses listed on your website are correct.
• Be consistent with your contact info: Be sure to post contact information in the same place across all of your locations. This makes it easier for customers to find and contact you, which will help boost your sales.
• Include geo-targeted keywords in your content.
• Create a Google Business account: Also create a Bing and Yahoo Business account. This is a great way to centralise your location information from across your entire business. Google Business allows you to create a profile for your entire business and then input all of your business locations into that profile. 
• Reviews: Always respond to negative reviews. This will show that you care about your business and the local customers.