How to create unique content for businesses with multiple locations?
-
I have a client that owns one franchise location of a franchise company with multiple locations. They have one large site with each location owning it's own page on the site, which I feel is the best route. The problem is that each location page has basically duplicate content on each page resulting in like 80 pages of duplicate content.
I'm looking for advice on how to create unique content for each location page? What types of information can we write about to make each page unique, because you can only twist sentences and content around so much before it just all sounds cookie cutter and therefore offering little value.
-
What about associations with other local businesses, any sponsorships and events? Are there any local events that the business gets involved in or are related to the business?
Is there anything specific/unique about the different customers at different locations? How can you tune the content to target/engage this particular demographic.
Are their any landmarks or well known places you can talk about (while you visiting x why not pop in for a y...)
And as EGOL said, I definitely agree that you need to get the people who know the area and know their customers to provide (and maintain) the content. Can you do this in a way that raised their profile, boosts their ego and motivates them rather than just lumbering them with something else to do?
It's a great opportunity to promote their business to their customers...
-
As David mentioned, directions are good because they're rarely the same.
In addition:
- Photos of the storefront, the inside of the store, and perhaps the kitchen or something like that.
- Name of store manager if they're comfortable with that.
- Schema.org markup of Address and phone number of course.
- Reviews/testimonials for that store location, even if they're pulled off of Yelp.
- Links to Yelp, Google Places, Foursquare, etc. for that store location.
There's a recent July 2012 statement by Matt Cutts suggesting that a couple sentences is plenty of unique content in a situation like this. Excerpt:
Eric Enge: Let’s switch gears a bit. Let’s talk about a pizza business with stores in 60 cities. When they build their site, they create pages for each city.
Matt Cutts: Where people get into trouble here is that they fill these pages with the exact same content on each page. “Our handcrafted pizza is lovingly made with the same methods we have been using for more than 50 years …”, and they’ll repeat the same information for 6 or 7 paragraphs, and it’s not necessary. That information would be great on a top-level page somewhere on the site, but repeating it on all those pages does not look good. If users see this on multiple pages on the site they aren’t likely to like it either.
Eric Enge: I think what site owners may argue is that if someone comes in from a search engine and lands on the Chicago page, and that is the only page they see on the site, they want to make their best pitch on that page. That user is also unlikely to also go visit the site’s Austin pizza page.
Matt Cutts: It is still not a good idea to repeat a ton of content over and over again.
Eric Enge: What should they put on those pages then?
Matt Cutts: In addition to address and contact information, 2 or 3 sentences about what is unique to that location and they should be fine.
So, I would focus on the Schema markup for the location, linking it to social profiles for that store, adding images or reviews as mentioned above, and making the page look nice. Anything else that is unique to that store is decent content to add.
-
1. Add some unique customer reviews to each location page. Legitimate of course
2. type out directions on how to get to that location using your own language. Use local landmarks and whatnot.
Make sure there is a page linked from the homepage that links to all of the location pages. Like a dealer locator page.
-
Franchisees should write about why their location and staff make their store the best place to grab a sub. If you don't know the location and you don't know the staff you can't be the author.
-
Any idea on what to suggest they write about? All of the franchisees are not my clients, but nevertheless I imagine the duplicate content is pulling my clients rankings down. Also if I could get this project that means more money:)
-
Make the franchisees do this work.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Event Schema markup for multiple events (same location/address)?
I was wondering if its possible to markup multiple events on the same page for one location/address using the event schema.org markup? I tried doing it on a sample page below: http://www.rama.id.au/event-schema-test/ Google's schema testing tool shows that its all good (except for warning for offers). Just wanted to know if I am doing it correctly or is there a better solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | Vsood0 -
Duplicated content in moz report due to Magento urls in a multiple language store.
Hi guys, Moz crawl is reporting as duplicated content the following urls in our store: http://footdistrict.com and http://footdistrict.com?___store=footdistrict_es The chain: ___store=footdistrict_es is added as you switch the language of the site. Both pages have the http://footdistrict.com" /> , but this was introduced some time after going live. I was wondering the best action to take considering the SEO side effects. For example: Permanent redirect from http://footdistrict.com?___store=footdistrict_es to http://footdistrict.com. -> Problem: If I'm surfing through english version and I switch to spanish, apache will realize that http://footdistrict.com?___store=footdistrict_es is going to be loaded and automatically it will redirect you to http:/footdistrict.com. So you will stay in spanish version for ever. Deleting the URLS with the store code from Google Web Admin tools. Problem: What about the juice? Adding those URL's to robots.txt. Problem: What about the juice? more options? Basically I'm trying to understand the best option to avoid these pages being indexed. Could you help here? Thanks a lot.
Technical SEO | | footd0 -
Duplicate Content - Products
When running a report it says we have lots of duplicate content. We are a e-commerce site that has about 45,000 sku's on the site. Products can be in multiple departments on the site. So the same products can show up on different pages of the site. Because of this the reports show multiple products with duplicate content. Is this an issue with google and site ranking? Is there a way to get around this issue?
Technical SEO | | shoedog1 -
Duplicate content problem?
Hello! I am not sure if this is a problem or if I am just making something too complicated. Here's the deal. I took on a client who has an existing site in something called homestead. Files cannot be downloaded, making it tricky to get out of homestead. The way it is set up is new sites are developed on subdomains of homestead.com, and then your chosen domain points to this subdomain. The designer who built it has kindly given me access to her account so that I can edit the site, but this is awkward. I want to move the site to its own account. However, to do so Homestead requires that I create a new subdomain and copy the files from one to the other. They don't have any way to redirect the prior subdomain to the new one. They recommend I do something in the html, since that is all I can access. Am I unnecessarily worried about the duplicate content consequences? My understanding is that now I will have two subdomains with the same exact content. True, over time I will be editing the new one. But you get what I'm sayin'. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | devbook90 -
Reusing content owned by the client on websites for other locations?
Hello All! Newbie here, so I'm working through some of my questions 🙂 I do have two major question regarding duplicate content: _Say a medical hospital has 4 locations, and chooses to create 4 separate websites. Each website would have the same design, but different NAP, and contact info, etc. Essentially, we'd be looking at creating their own branded template. _ My question 1.) If the hospitals all offer similar services, with roughly the same nav, does it make sense to have multiple websites? I figure this makes the most sense in terms of optimizing for their differing locations. 2.) If the hospital owns the content on the first site, I'm assuming it is still necessary to change it duplicates for the other properties? Or is it possible to differentiate between the duplication of owned content from other instances of content duplication? Everyone has been fantastic here so far, looking forward to some feedback!
Technical SEO | | kbaltzell0 -
Local Keywords Not Ranking Well in a Geographic Location (but Rank Very Well Outside of Geographic Location)
Has anyone experienced, in the last few months, an issue where a website that once ranked well for 'local' terms in Google stopped ranking well for those terms (but saw a ranking decrease only within the geographic location contained within those keywords)? For example only, some 'root' keywords could be: Chicago dentist Chicago dentists dentist Chicago dentists Chicago What happens is that when a searcher searches from within the geographic area of Chicago, IL, the target website no longer ranks on the 1st page for these types of keyword phrases, but they used to rank in the top 3 perhaps. However, if someone was to search for the same keyword phrases from another city outside of Chicago or set a custom location (such as Illinois or even Milwaukee, WI perhaps) in their Google search, the target website appears to have normal (high) 1st page rankings for these types of terms. My own theory: At first I thought it was a Penguin related issue but the client's rankings overall haven't appeared to have been affected on the date(s) of Penguin updates. Authority Labs and Raven Tools (which uses Authority Labs data) did not detect any ranking decrease and still reports all the local keyword rankings as high on the 1st page of Google. However, when the client themselves goes to check their own rankings (as they are within that affected geographic area), they are no where to be found on the 1st page. :S After some digging I found that (one of) the company's Google Places listings (the main office listing) became an 'unsupported' status in Google Maps. So now I am thinking that this phenomenon is due to the fact that other listings are now appearing in search results for the same location. For example, in this case, an individual dentist's Google Places listing (who works within the dental office) is being displayed instead of the actual dental office's listing. Also, the dentist's name on the Google Places listing is being swapped out by Google with the name of the dental office, but if you click through to the Google Places listing, it shows the name of the individual Dentist. Anyone encounter a similar issue or have any other theories besides the Google Places issue?
Technical SEO | | OrionGroup0 -
Duplicate content error - same URL
Hi, One of my sites is reporting a duplicate content and page title error. But it is the same page? And the home page at that. The only difference in the error report is a trailing slash. www.{mysite}.co.uk www.{mysite}.co.uk/ Is this an easy htaccess fix? Many thanks TT
Technical SEO | | TheTub1 -
How to tell if PDF content is being indexed?
I've searched extensively for this, but could not find a definitive answer. We recently updated our website and it contains links to about 30 PDF data sheets. I want to determine if the text from these PDFs is being archived by search engines. When I do this search http://bit.ly/rRYJPe (google - site:www.gamma-sci.com and filetype:pdf) I can see that the PDF urls are getting indexed, but does that mean that their content is getting indexed? I have read in other posts/places that if you can copy text from a PDF and paste it that means Google can index the content. When I try this with PDFs from our site I cannot copy text, but I was told that these PDFs were all created from Word docs, so they should be indexable, correct? Since WordPress has you upload PDFs like they are an image could this be causing the problem? Would it make sense to take the time and extract all of the PDF content to html? Thanks for any assistance, this has been driving me crazy.
Technical SEO | | zazo0