Multi-Location SEO: Where To Start?
What is Multi-Location SEO?
Multi-location SEO describes traffic that comes in from local intent within markets where the brand is present.
In short, multi-location SEO combines all of the brand’s local SEO efforts to further increase its visibility in search engines. For businesses with multiple locations, SEO is crucial for driving foot traffic.
For an SEO, managing a multi-location campaign means creating location-relevant landing pages and monitoring keyword rankings with GeoTracking – rank tracking by a specific location or a zip code.
Each location needs its own campaign that focuses on its specific geo-location separate from the company’s larger SEO strategy.
Where To Start?
Study the Local Competition
When a brick and mortar business decides to expand into a second location, as you may be doing alongside your expanded SEO campaign, it is important to have an idea of what the competition is doing; in fact, WHO the competition is at all is an important first question to answer. Once you know who you are up against, you can start to study their own online tactics in order to understand what you are competing with for the coveted top spot on the Google organic search results page.
Map Out Your Site
If you plan to target multiple locations with an SEO campaign, you will need a different page for each location. If you try to cover all areas on a single page, Google and the other search engines will not know what to do with the overage of keywords on that page and will ultimately drop your page score for every location. Instead, you will need to create a new landing page for every location in a logical and organized manner. Remember that Google’s crawlers grade your marketing website based on your sitemap, so this is a key step,
Organize Your URLs!
As with your sitemap, web crawlers judge you based on the structure of your URLs. The following template is a basic structure that you can follow, in tandem with a consistent and navigable sitemap, in order to help your new customers find you:
Page 1 – www.yoursite.com/location1/
Also, Page 2 – www.yoursite.com/location1/service1
Then, Page 3 – www.yoursite.com/location1/service2
Know Your Keywords
It’s no secret that keywords are the backbone of a strong digital SEO campaign (but only a small piece of a much bigger picture). Doing a lot of research before determining the keywords that you will focus on can save you a lot of time and wasted effort if you simply throw in the first keywords you think of and get to writing. Of course, even this approach is better than not writing any content at all, but the difference between a mediocre SEO campaign and a digital campaign that converts is the research that goes into it.
Provide Useful Information
Too often, an SEO newcomer (or unethical service provider) will focus more on their keywords and less on the actual marketing content, which can lead to getting flagged by the search engines for keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is an easy way to have Google lower you on the result page, but it is also a great way to show your potential customers that you will cut corners with the work you provide to them, too.