Multiple locations business | Local SEO

[Alex_G]

Hi guys,

I need your professional advice.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Alex,

Good questions. I'm going to run through these pretty quickly since there are quite a few. I would first recommend that you study the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which answer many of your questions:

https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en

1) Google Places

1.  Do not create a Google+ Local listing for any location except a real, physical location that is open to the public during stated business hours (like a restaurant) or from which staff goes to serve clients (like a plumber) and at which the phone is answered during stated business hours.

2. While Google is fine with home-based businesses, they must be staffed businesses where a phone is answered during normal business hours and you must be sure to comply with their rules about hiding your address. There is grey area here. Be careful. Using residential addresses can become spammy and Google is wise to it. Again, see the guidelines.

3. Each location must have a unique local area code phone number. Do not duplicate phone numbers or use 800 or call tracking numbers.

4. If you have a legitimate multi-location business, best practice is to build a landing page on the site for each office and link to the respective URL for this page from each Google+ Local listing.

2) NAP

1. Your NAP should be identical everywhere on the web. Never add keywords, city names or other modifiers to the business name.

Questions 2, 3 & 4 - see above advice in previous section.

3) Company name and domain name.

If you are a brand new company and are just now naming your business, it can help to have keywords be a legitimate part of your business name. In other words, it can be better to be Anaheim Plumbing Company vs. Bob's Fix-it Service. If your company already has a brand, re-branding is an enormous task. Not sure if this is what you are asking about.

Regarding domain names, having keywords in the domain can provide a small competitive edge, but my preference is for the domain name to authentically represent the business name. If a company is called Smith TV Installation, I'd be totally fine with having smithtvinstallation.com as the domain name. Of course, you can go with the shorter name if the name is just way too long. What you definitely want to avoid is publishing a weak site with an 'exact match domain', as this has been the subject of recent Google penalties. In other words, don't buy 50 domains with geo-specific-keyword-oriented words in them and then publish weak and duplicate content on them.

There are many good choices you can make when it comes to naming your business or buying your domain. My preferred approach is to be as authentic as you can with your brand, whenever and wherever you can.

4. Unfortunately, due to non-disclosure policies, I can't share my own clients sites with you. It sounds to me like you may not actually be promoting a true mutli-location site if you've only got a single office. I recommend that your first step be to study the guidelines and identify what your business model type really is. That's a vital first step! Hope this helps.

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, it sounds like you are looking for a complete guide on Local SEO, if this is the case here is the website by Andrew Shotland http://www.localseoguide.com/ so book mark this for the latest and important new with reference to Local SEO

As far as your questions are concern here are my answers:

-          You can also optimize your website for other locations as well the idea is to create separate pages for each location and include location in the title tag and page content.

-          Register one office under one physical location and if you don’t have a physical location I think it’s better not to register your office on fake location

-          As far as I think you cannot use same phone numbers for multiple locations.

-          As I said the best is to use the separate page for each location

-          If you mean low quality directories, just don’t go for it… if they are quality local directories use company name with different location sounds better to me but make it look relevant and natural. If you mean aggregators use company name only.

-          Phone number should be different for each location

-          Use URL that contain location name when using for different location.

Domain name and company name does not matter much so try to make it something that attract your audience. Try not to add the location if you need to serve different locations under one domain

I guess I answered all question but do not have any example so I hope someone else can help you with this!

Hope this helps!