If you scale your business and open a second location, you need to scale your marketing.
Whether you’ve opened a new spot in another part of the town or trying to conquer a new city, you have to rethink your SEO strategy.
Local SEO for Businesses With Multiple Locations.
The fact that you have multiple business locations doesn’t change the local SEO strategy.
You need to work on your on-page and off-page and optimize your Google Business profile.
The only difference is that you will have to do it at scale – for each location your business has.
How to Implement Local SEO for Multiple Business Locations.
Here’s what you need to know in order to implement local SEO for multiple business locations:
1. Start With Keyword Research.
Every strategy should start with research.
Write down every area you want to target and find how many people search for your product and services in those areas.
Sort out the most lucrative keywords with the highest monthly volume and perfectly fit the user’s search intent to buy your products or services.
Now, we have a list of target keywords for our landing pages.
But you can’t just create landing pages for each of your locations.
When Google’s algorithm crawls a page, it can understand the intent of the page, and it doesn’t like when all a website has is pages selling products or services.
That’s why you also need informational content on your website.
It’s different for each industry, but the golden rule is you need to have a ratio of at least 30/70 – meaning 30% of commercial pages and 70% of purely informational content.
So after we’ve done our keyword research for our landing pages, we need to find keywords we can use to write blog posts.
For example, if you have an insurance agency and you’re targeting New York, the target keyword for your landing page could be “insurance agency new york.”
And one of the keywords we could use for our informational content could be “why is car insurance so expensive in new york,” which has a good search volume on its own – around 70-100 per month.
2. Create a Landing Page for Each Business Location.
Once we have our list of target keywords, we can start creating landing pages.
You will need to create a separate page for each location you have.
And those pages need to be tightly optimized for their target keywords.
You probably won’t need to create a unique page for each location. You can create a template and then reuse it for each location.
In local SEO, target keywords often contain the location – like “… in denver” or “… in austin” – and a location serves as a very strong modifier for the search query, so you won’t run into the issue with duplicate content.
3. Write Content Relevant to the Local Area.
After you have your landing pages up, you can start your content marketing strategy.
It’s a good practice to start by targeting low-volume, low-competition keywords for your blog.
That way, you can start ranking on page one in no time and bring relevant traffic to your website.
4. Set Up Your Google Business Profile for Each Location.
If you already have your Google Business profile and you’re opening a new location with a new address, you need to create a new profile for your new office.
And again, there’s no change in the strategy. The only difference is that you’ll have to do it at scale.
So, just the way you’ve optimized and managed your Google Business profile for your first location, you will have to do the same things for the new one.
5. Create Citations for Each Business Location.
Google needs to know that you are a real business.
And that’s why you need to build citations.
Citations are your general business information like your business name, local address, and phone number (NAP) scattered across the web, so when Google crawls the web, it can understand that you are a real business.
When you open a new location, you probably have the same business name, but your local address and phone number are going to change.
So you will have to build new cations with your new address and phone number.
Final Words.
The good news is that you are not starting from the ground up.
You have already established your business as an authority in Google’s eyes.
So when you open a new location and start competing for new keywords, the road to the top of your local search results will be much easier than it was when you were just starting out.