Local SEO - 2 Locations
-
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?
-
Hey Guys,
This is great information - thank you so much!
Jack
-
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!
-
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!
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
-
Practitioner Vs Practice Listings: Local Pack Issues
Hi, and THANK YOU! in advance for any input you give, its much appreciated. We've been doing research on this and also wanted to see if the community could provide any more input. We work with a plastic surgery clinic. The namesake of the surgery clinic is that of the first doctor: Practice Name: Gardner Plastic Surgery Plastic Surgeon 1: Dr. Gardner (we've worked with him since at least 2015) Plastic Surgeon 2: Dr. Baccaro (joined practice June 2018) Plastic Surgeon 3: Dr. Crespo (joining their practice starting Sept. 1 2020!) To summarize our issues to date: As we brought on our new surgeon Dr. Baccaro in 2018 we decided to ultimately claim his practitioner GMB listing, and to claim Dr. Gardner's (which had been unclaimed and we had to eliminate duplicates.) Before deciding to utilize the supplementary practitioner listings, we were managing/optimizing their main practice listing: Gardner Plastic Surgery. We continued to primarily/heavily optimize “Gardner Plastic Surgery” and mimicked the details for “Dr. Gardner” and “Dr. Baccaro” From Dec. 2018 - Jan. 2020 we would from time to time notice that "Dr. Paul Gardner's" individual listing was showing up in Local Pack instead of "Gardner Plastic Surgery" but it was not really a big issue, happened very occasionally. Around Dec. 2020 - Jan. 2020 we experienced some Google errors when trying to create Google Posts with videos--it resulted in a few very random and unexpected suspensions. We were posting appropriate content, it seemed that Google was struggling to process our video files from API and it would get stuck in a loop etc. All in all the suspensions happened, and we worked with Google many times to try to understand and stop that from happening. Fortunately that hasn't happened since (and we now don't post videos to Google posts because that was a bit too stressful. We still upload to main photo/video area) Since February 2020 to present we have consistently noticed "Dr. Paul Gardner" appearing in place of the well-optimized full of photos/videos/posts "Gardner Plastic Surgery." We thought algorithm updates etc./COVID were all factors as to why doctors may be more prescient than a clinic. There were times where we thought it was fixed for sure, only for it to continue to crop up. Specifically we were trying to rank for the search term "naples plastic surgeon" What We've Done So Far: I've done a LOT of research and understand a number of errors we were overlooking from Q&As like this (duplicate categories/phone numbers): https://moz.com/community/q/gmb-page-for-law-not-ranking-but-individual-attorneys-names-are And: https://moz.com/community/q/partner-outranking-main-site-in-local So I understand we have some decisions to make on the best path forward. We’re guilty of just about all of the issues Miriam elaborates on. ** As we move forward there are a few elements at play:** They are adding a new surgeon to the practice in September, we’re excited! Making a clear decision before he arrives is important With the addition of the 3<sup>rd</sup> surgeon “Gardner Plastic Surgery” is actually changing the name of its business to “Naples Plastic Surgery” as its much more suiting to the growing scope of practice. ** To end:** Wow. I wrote a lot and really appreciate it if you stuck with me! Some thoughts I had that I wonder if anyone has insight on: Is the fact that “Gardner Plastic Surgery” is “Dr. Gardner’s” namesake a huge factor into why the individual doctor is popping up more often? He’s well known and his name and his business name have been around the internet for years longer than Dr. Baccaro etc. Do you think changing the name to “Naples Plastic Surgery” along with other needed updates could help address the issue? Could our string of unfortunate, though ultimately well-intentioned suspensions be part of what’s enabled “Dr. Paul Gardner” to prop up as well? Should we choose to heavily optimize all listings and see how diversifying categories etc. helps? Should we try to de-optimize and focus on practice profile for now as that’s our main listing? If you have any other recommendations, I’d love to hear them. I think working on optimizing and diversifying our listings would be useful. Thank you again.
Local Listings | | MoxxiMarketing0 -
What is the best SEO practice for listing multiple locations from the same business online?
Hello! The church I work for is launching its third location and we are needing to figure out what the best SEO practice would be when it comes to to listing all three of our locations online. Currently, we are listing the two locations we have as "Church Name - South Campus" and "Church Name - West Campus." Going forward, would it be better to list our 3 location names as: James River Church - South Campus, James River Church - West Campus, James River Church - North Campus or James River Church South Campus, James River Church West Campus, James River Church North Campus or list all three locations as "James River Church" Thank you for any advice you can give me!
Local Listings | | chris.oursbourn0 -
Google Local Listing Ranking/Traffic Metrics in the Google Search Console?
A client of mine asked me if it was possible to see local listing data (ranking/traffic stats) in the Google Search Console for a URL. I figured the Google Search Console only shows organic metrics not 3-pack/local listing performance. However I could be mistaken. Does the Google Search Console report this?
Local Listings | | RosemaryB0 -
Actions to take when client is missing local SEO usernames and passwords
Hello, I'm doing an SEO analysis for a company and they told me that they do not have their local SEO usernames and passwords that they have already done. They did about 20 local directories and switched business models and needs to correct them without the usernames and passwords. I do not specialize in local SEO, and I would simply start from scratch, but what else can I tell them about doing a good job rebuilding with a new business model without the 20 usernames and passwords. Thanks, Bob
Local Listings | | BobGW0 -
Local Search - Multiple Locations, do i link the home page or the inner page?
Hello, For a business with multiple locations that has a web url built for each location such as: Website.com/miami Website.com/los-angeles For local search (Google+, Yelp, etc), is it best to link the local search pages to the specific page of that location? Or is the homepage sufficient enough? I ask that because it is ALREADY touch getting NATURAL links to a location page, so would local search do me good by linking to the exact page of the location?
Local Listings | | Shawn1241 -
Looking for SEO Specialist Contractor!
Polyvore is looking for an SEO Specialist (Contract role)! Click here to apply: https://hire.jobvite.com/j?aj=oZv4Yfwg&s=Moz As an SEO expert, you will help acquire users to Polyvore through organic search. You will also be key to helping engineering team understand SEO best practices. Our ideal service provider is someone who has a deep understanding of SEO in the e-commerce space. Key Responsibilities Audit all Polyvore pages and help the engineering team understand their relative importance to SEO Provide SEO best practices for e-commerce space and help build out automated tools to ensure these best practices Help investigate issues related to SEO including but not limited to changes in organic search traffic Review upcoming designs from SEO perspective & suggest improvements before the changes are implemented What does success look like? Overall increase in organic search traffic to Polyvore A set of automated SEO tools that help catch SEO issues proactively A monitoring plan to catch SEO issues early (i.e. which tools to use, what to track, how to predict potential issues) Click here to apply: https://hire.jobvite.com/j?aj=oZv4Yfwg&s=Moz
Local Listings | | seomoz_polyvore.com0 -
How does google choose the local searches?
In a larger city (london for example) when there are dozens of one specific industry, how does Google choose who to show in their local results? For example if I type "solicitor london" it shows me 7 local results, but I know there are far more than 7 solicitors in London. Do they change as frequently as the rest of the serps or is there something you can do to ensure you get in that local search? Added to this, does being part of a chain/franchise make a difference? Help/thoughts/advice would be appreciated.
Local Listings | | Gordon_Hall0