MAINTAINING LOCAL SEO

Maintaining local SEO may be difficult for multi-location businesses. Small inconsistencies, website bugs, or lack of a location page can diminish your local SEO score. That being said, there are some tips while setting up a website with multiple locations that will prevent companies from taking a big hit in local SEO.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS PAGE

The first major key to maintaining local SEO with multiple businesses is properly setting up a Google My Business (GMB) page. Google My Business is a program run by Google that links other programs such as Google Search and Google Maps. GMB is essential to building local SEO for all businesses. When working with multiple business locations, multiple GMB profiles are necessary. And the key element (and where some businesses overlook) is consistency. Making sure that each profile is consistent with the information on each GMB page is essential to building and maintaining local SEO. When setting up separate profiles, double-check to make sure that every element that each location shares, is the same throughout. ^[4]

WEBSITES & LOCAL SEO

There are a couple of options when setting up websites for local SEO. The first option is to set up separate URLs within the main website for each individual location. According to Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts, each location should get its own unique URL and each page and their respective URL should be included in your sitemap to help Google and other search engines index the content.^[1] The second option is creating separate websites for each location. Managing multiple websites may be costly and a pain, but it could make a big difference in the user experience (being local) and also bring in relevant traffic. By having multiple websites, you can tailor information and keywords to each certain location. Keep in mind that many Google searches include a city followed by a service, so having specific pages set up to locations may generate more hits.^[1] One thing to be cautious about while setting up multiple websites is carrying over too much information between sites. It’s alright to carry basic information over, but the point of having multiple websites is to be able to tailor the information to each location. Each website should be unique to its location for a more personable user experience.

Think of ways to share your involvement with your community.

Local SEO is a very important aspect of online marketing. Maintaining local SEO quickly becomes tricky while dealing with multiple locations. While trying to optimize local SEO, remember to take great caution while setting up Google My Business profiles. Make sure every similarity between locations is consistent. Setting up URLs or unique websites for each location is also very important. Keeping these tips in mind while working with multiple locations will assist in better local SEO.

Written by: Kody Gerard

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MAINTAINING LOCAL SEO WITH MULTIPLE LOCATIONS