How to Handle Multiple Locations

[thinkcreativegroup]

We are working with a client who will have multiple locations––same company, same services [for the most part], different location. They want each location to get picked up locally in the search engines.

What is the best way to handle the website and URLs?

One overarching website with a page for each location?
Separate Company Name with the town in each - "XYZ Company - Orlando"?
Have a separate URL with the town name for each location that points each location's page?
All addresses on each page in the footer?

Thanks.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi vzPro,

Absolutely. Schema for local is a very good thing to use whenever a physical address exists. Also, thought you might like to read a fairly recent article of mine on the topic of city landing pages. A lot of folks have told me it helped them to understand their opportunities.

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403

Hope this helps!

[DarinPirkey]

Thanks for the extra info Miriam.  Do you think adding "Local Business" schema is a good idea for these landing pages too?  Is there any SEO value to that?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi ThinkCreativeGroup,

Great discussion going on here. I'll try to add a bit.

• Yes, have a unique page for each of the locations on the website. Make sure that the content on each of the pages is unique. Do not simply change out keywords from page to page. Take the most creative approach you can to each location and find something of value to the user to write about.

• Optimizing the website footer with the NAP (name, address, phone) for each of the locations is a best practice if the total number of locations isn't too large. I would say 6 or less would be fine.

• You can also put all of these locations on a main contact page.

• Yes, having the name of the city in your legal business name or DBA may be of some value, but be careful that:

1. You are listing it identically in all places across the web. In other words, don't be Bob's Chicago Taco Shop in some places and Bob's Taco Shop in others. Unless the business is utterly new and has absolutely no footprint (including offline Yellowpages), then chances are the name of the business has already been indexed in a variety of places. If the business chooses to change its name, all citations must be updated to match so that only one form of the business name exists everywhere. Also, be advised that if your client has already built up a good rep on the web around their existent name (with local listings, reviews, citations, etc.) then a change of name can be catastrophic. You can expect to lose all reviews and many citations by changing the name of an established business, as a new name will be a signal of a brand new business. So, be careful with this!

2. You are not over-optimizing your title tags. A few months ago, Andre Weyher (formerly of Matt Cutts' search quality team) said in an interview, "Don't put more than 2 commercial keywords in your titles or Google will frown on it." This statement led to an interesting theoretical disussion over at CatalysteMarketing's local search forum in which it was suggested that a city name not appear too many times in a title tag. (see: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-seo-ranking/984-local-search-engine-optimization-warning-city-title.html)

I mention this here because, if you are Bob's Chicago Taco Shop, and you're putting your business name in your title tags, then your name represents one usage of a city name. So, be aware of that and don't over-do it.

[DarinPirkey]

I would definitely take the time to read up on this blog post from Mike Ramsey over at NiftyMarketing.  It was posted on SEOmoz at the end of January.  It will answer a lot of your questions.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/40-important-local-search-questions-answered

[thinkcreativegroup]

Thanks, very helpful!

Each location is in the same city, does that change your response at all? And, is it OK if each landing page is within the same site with a separate URL, or should the landing pages be completely separate sites?

[Mike.Goracke]

I would have a single locations page that lists all of your businesses locations by city, state.

I would link the city, state to a landing page for the specific city,state.

Each city, state landing page would have a unique, URL, title, headings, content, etc that would use a format like Keyword | City, State | XYZ Company - because if someone Googles your company name, you should already come up... it is more important to have the keywords, then city or city, then keywords in your title - do some keyword research on this to see which is best for you.

THEN register each of those city,state landing pages using GetListed.org - this will help you build up your local presence in those areas since you have a physical office location.

If you wanted, you could do the footer idea... I think that gets to be kind of spammy, but I guess it all depends on the industry and the number of locations.

Hope that helps.

Mike

[thinkcreativegroup]

Thanks for the responses, they make sense.

Do you know if adding the name of location into the official company name will have any impact on SEO?

And, should we list the locations in the footer or on a "locations" page?

[jesse-landry]

you could also modify subdomains

i.e. www.company.com; orlando.company.com; seattle.company.com etc..

[hamidre13]

The bese way is to have one website with multiple urls for different locations with the right title tag. This way gives me the most feedback. I did this for a payroll company and it worked out great. so if your website is example.com you can say the locations url can be example.com/locations/orlando.html