SEO for multiple retail locations

[AlanJacob]

I have a retail client with some 200 plus retail locations around the U.S. In light of this I am wondering about the best way for them to be practicing SEO with regards to social and multiple locations.  Moz Local recommends listings with services/sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Acxiom, Foursquare, Facebook, etc, but what is best to do when one has many locations? Should there be a listing in these services for each retail location? Do they stick to 1 of each social sites but have a listing for each store in each online business directory? What about Google +, which seems to play an increasing role?

Thanks

[LindaBuquet]

"As far as Social is concern, I would advise you to go one page for each state and cover all stores that comes under that particular state"

Actually if they create a Google+ Local page for each store - which they should in order to rank in local... then that page will also automatically be a G+ Business page with social features as well. They could opt to not use all the store pages for social and just have a brand Social page - but just letting you know all locations with a G+ L page will also be social pages.

To set up for 200 locations you want to use the bulk datafeed, now called "Google My Business Locations":  https://support.google.com/business/answer/6002002?hl=en

[MoosaHemani]

Hi Alan, I am working for a medical store that have around 25+ locations within one state and what I did is that I get all their locations and submit in Google and other local websites like Yelp, Manta, Yahoo, Bing and others.

As far as Social is concern, I would advise you to go one page for each state and cover all stores that comes under that particular state as creating unique social pages for each location might increase your level of work and information collection of all stores might takes ages.

Adding my to cents!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Alan!

Good question! Provided that each physical location has its own local phone number, then citation building (the practice of building listings on local business directories) is almost certainly going to be an appropriate part of your marketing strategy. When dealing with 200 locations, the use of tools and services that can automate at least some of the process for you will be a tremendous time-saver.

Moz Local is one such service. In order to use this service, you will need to have either a unique Google+ Local page or Facebook Place page for each of the physical locations, already in place. As Ray-pp has mentioned, you should take advantage of Google's bulk upload, which allows you to create a .CSV of all listings and upload them all at once, rather than building 200 individual listings by hand. The good news is, if your Google .CSV is formatted properly, you can also use it in our system So, you'd want to get the Google listings in good order and then, once they are live and verified, upload the same .CSV to Moz Local. This will likely save you a tremendous amount of time in getting the listings pushed out to our 7 supported partner sites, which are some of the most important local data sources on the web.

Hope this helps!

[Ray-pp]

Hi AlanJacob,

If your client has physical retail locations, as you've said, then you'll want to get each location listed with Google.

Google provides a bulk location edit tool. You can review the protocol here: https://support.google.com/business/topic/4662257?hl=en&ref_topic=4539578