Local SEO - 2 Locations

[Jack1166]

Hi SEO pros,

If I'm undertaking SEO for a company which has a single website (no location specific pages) and 2 office locations I'm curious on a couple of points:

1. Obviously setting up 2 locations in GMB is a must, but in terms of citation building is it just a case of needing to input 2 citations into every directory (one for each address)

2. Link building - assuming this doesn't change much from when you're ranking for one location?

3. Schema markup - Do i need to create 2 x local business schema and input both into the headers?

4. On-page SEO - trying to rank for 2 locations I'm assuming is much more difficult as you can't optimise both location keywords throughout the site - does anyone know a way around this?

[Jack1166]

Hey Guys,

This is great information - thank you so much!

Jack

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Jack,

I recommend that you tell the client that the first step is the create a really good landing page on the website for each of the locations. You can then link from each citation set you build to its respective landing page. The alternative is to link citations for both locations to the homepage, but statistics indicate this may decreased conversions.

So, yes, you build a unique citation set for each location.

In terms of linkbuilding, if the locations are in the same city, it's likely your links will be relevant to both, but if they are in different cities, then it would be smart to begin developing relationships in each locale that can lead to good, local links for each branch.

You should be doing Schema markup for each of the locations, yes. I recommend you read Schema expert David Deering's explanation on this page: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/lULikkVHVRo

Regarding on-page SEO, the difficulty typically lies in the fact that a business that formerly had a single location (and optimized their whole website around the single location) now has two of them. You're left asking if you should just add in the second city name to optimize core pages (home, about, etc.). With just two location, you can often go this route (e.g. "Serving Dallas and Sugar Land" instead of just "Serving Dallas" in your tags and text). Then, you'll have to see how far that approach gets you with the second city. More often than not, though, you'll come back to the concept that you really do need a unique landing page for each locale so that you have at least one, very focused, fully optimized page on the website for each branch. This article can help you get going with this: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

The client you are marketing is at a turning point if they've just recently expanded. Now is the ideal time to consider their strategy, to determine to create strong landing pages instead of duplicative/weak ones, to base their citation building on the existence of these well-created pages and to go forward on a strong, clear path, instead of giving only a half-effort now, only to have to come back and correct it later.

Hope this helps!

[brettmandoes]

Hey there, we do this **A LOT **at my agency (I'm currently managing three enterprise local SEO clients) so I think I can help you.

1. Your citations are composed of your NAP+W information, so the best situation is to make sure that it's as unique as possible between the two separate locations. 
   a. Name - this will probably be the same unless your client has a naming convention like "FroYo Blast San Diego" and "FroYo Blast Sacramento". 
   b. Address - this will be unique
   c. Phone - This **can be **unique and should be. I know some clients send everything through a call center and that's suboptimal. 
   d. Website - create location specific landing pages and link to those. 
If you follow this then the only non-unique item in there is potentially the name. What we've found across something like 350 websites/locations is that the more unique this information is, the better rankings tend to be.

2. For local SEO we've never needed to actively build links outside of citations and we rank page 1, often position 1, for highly competitive queries. Relevant content is more important, so make link building a lower priority. You may need to work on backlinks if you are in a very competitive space, but small local businesses generally have a hard time getting backlinks, which is probably one reason why it's not as important a signal. If it were, then the only HVAC businesses showing up in search would be the ones paying SEOs for link building services which I think Google realized.

3. Put the locations into your footer and wrap those in schema. You could do the header too I suppose, but from user testing we've found it's better to keep the header area decluttered. Start putting in too many phone numbers up top and people get confused.

4. We build a unique website for each location. When you can't do that your best bet is to build landing pages that optimize for the location. On one of our programs we have about 1500 of those landing pages, and we rank on page 1 for a little over half of our 18,000+ targeted keywords with that strategy. It's harder if you're not physically in that location, but since you have a physical location that makes it easier. Make sure you're mentioning the target location in your meta data, like title and h1 tags where appropriate. That helps!

Best of luck!