If you’re a local business with one location, whether that’s an office or cafe etc, or you only provide your services in one area, local SEO is pretty straightforward. Claim your Google Business Profile, optimise it with reviews, images and posts, and have a small website showcasing your services in the area you work in.
If you’re a local business with one location, whether that’s an office or cafe etc, or you only provide your services in one area, local SEO is pretty straightforward.
Claim your Google Business Profile, optimise it with reviews, images and posts, and have a small website showcasing your services in the area you work in.
But if you’re a business with multiple premises in different areas, or you’re a service business working within a larger area, local SEO can be a bit more complicated.
This blog, part of our local SEO guide, should make it easier.
As a business, you probably see each location as part of a whole.
But for Google, and your customers, each location is an individual business.
Each location has its own team, they have area expertise, they have their own customers.
This means each location needs to be visible in its own right, not just seen as a “branch” of a bigger business.
By treating each location as part of a bigger business, you could end up missing out on search rankings and traffic, fewer new customers, penalties from Google when you start duplicating content across your
website, and a lack of visibility of how your marketing is performing on a local level.
As a local SEO agency that’s helped hundreds of businesses become more visible in different locations, from doing SEO for estate agents, to helping national storage firms promote their locations, we’ve seen a few mistakes when it comes to handling local SEO.
This is easy to do when services are similar across each location, but it can cost you big in search rankings and traffic. Don’t just copy and paste service pages and change the name of the location.
Google and other search engines will see this as duplicate content, and you could be hit with a penalty that hurts your online visibility.
Your Google Business Profile is like your website in the sense that it can get you listed at the top of Google when people search for your services.
This means you should treat it as an area landing page, and not a single account for every location.
Every location you work from or in needs to have its own optimised Google Business Profile.
Google and search engines use your business’ name, address and phone number as a check that your business is legitimate, and that the information you’re providing on your website and Google Business Profile is accurate.
If you have different information listed around the web (like if you’ve moved office and not updated your address), it could mean Google making you less visible for local searches.
Each of your local area pages should include information about the local area, or you should create content relevant to the area you’re working in.
For example, if you’re a plumber, you could create content about specific problems people in an area might have, like if they’re in old properties with unusual plumbing issues.
Use case studies and projects specific to the areas you’ve worked in, not just generic ones.
This local content is a signal to search engines that you have local expertise, which can help with local search results.
Your website’s URL structure should be created to reflect that you either have multiple offices, or offer your services in multiple locations.
I’d highly recommend keeping this structure as simple as possible to help with managing it later down the line as you scale and add more locations.
A simple URL structure, if you have multiple offices or branches, could be:
yourdomain.co.uk/location/liverpool
yourdomain.co.uk/location/manchester
As you add more branches, you simply add them to the parent “location” URL and hit publish.
Here’s an example of one of our clients, The Storage Team, who structure their business’s URL this way for local SEO…
Another option, typically used when you offer services in multiple locations without necessarily having a branch in that area, is to use a service+location keyword in your URL, which would look like this…
yourdomain.co.uk/service+location
or
yourdomain.co.uk/service/location
This is the structure used by Jennor, an office refurbishment company that we created location pages for as part of their local SEO strategy…
If you go away with one tip for writing location pages for your local SEO, make it this.
Each location page needs to have unique content.
Don’t just copy and paste service or location pages and change the name of the area.
This will get flagged as duplicate content by search engines. And search engines don’t like duplicate content. It confuses them.
And when search engines get confused about your pages, it can mean you don’t rank as high as you could. Or, that you don’t rank at all.
Make your services relevant to the local area. Talk about challenges local customers have that you’ve solved before. Mention things potential customers have said on sales calls, and use this to make your pages relevant.
Use testimonials and case studies from customers you’ve got in the specific area you’re creating the page for.
As you can see below from our client, The Storage Team, each testimonial mentions the service they had at the individual location, making it relevant to the location page.
If you have an office in the area you’re creating the page for, you should include the Name, Address and Phone number of that local branch.
You could also embed a Google Map with your location on the page, showing exactly where you are, and giving people the option to get directions to your location.
Again, The Storage Team do this well with the storage facility address at the top of each area page, and a Google Map further down pinpointing the exact location of the facility.
Include your opening hours. Put pictures of the staff who work in the location (put faces to the business that your customers will be dealing with). Use team pictures from events or community activities you take part in.
All this helps to make your location page unique, and more importantly, relevant to the local audience.
Remember, each location should be treated as a business in its own right, not just as a branch of a bigger business.
Finally, include calls to action throughout the page. And make the calls to action specific and action based.
Book a consultation. Get an audit. Call us.
People need to be told what you want them to do.
If you get all these elements into your location page, you’ll be in a good position to not only rank high in relevant local searches, but convert customers who land on your page.
Each location should have its own Google Business Profile, that’s verified.
We’ve written more about setting up Google Business Profiles, and you should follow the same process for each of your location profiles.
As a start, each profile should include:
Business name
Location specific address and phone number
Business/ service category
Photos
Reviews
Remember, each Google Business Profile should be treated as a standalone profile and managed individually.
You can do this on a branch-by-branch basis or manage everything centrally.
Again, we’ve written about the importance of having a consistent name, address and phone number for your local business.
This needs to be consistent across every profile.
You can manage reviews locally and assign individual branches to source and secure their own reviews (as they’ll have the customer relationships), or you can try and manage this centrally.
There’s no right or wrong way to handle reviews, it’s whatever works best and is easiest to scale for your business.
Remember to respond to any review you get on each profile.
Each location page should have LocalBusiness schema.
Schema is structured data that helps search engines understand what your webpage is about.
For a business operating or located in multiple locations, local business schema gives search engines the local information they need to show your page for relevant local searches.
You can create this schema using a schema generator and either add it to your site directly in the header code, or by using an SEO tool like Wincher that helps you add schema markup to pages in the CMS, rather than through code.
As well as creating pages for each business location, you should create locally relevant links to those pages.
This could be through local business directories, links from the local Chamber of Commerce, by supporting local initiatives or community events, or by sponsoring local sports teams or community groups.
You can also join up with other local businesses and organisations and swap links between your sites.
If you’re putting all this effort into local SEO, or are using a local SEO agency to help, you’ll want to measure how successful everything is (or see what needs improving).
There are lots of free and paid-for tools you can use to measure the success of your local SEO for each business location.
Google Analytics (GA4) is a free tool that lets you see how people find your website, and what they do when they get there.
It allows you to view or set up custom reports to track performance across multiple landing pages, showing key metrics like traffic volume, traffic source, and conversions.
For businesses trying to monitor multiple location pages, you can use the landing page report under the engagement tab:
This will give you information on which pages users are first landing on when they get to your website, and can help you see which of your location pages are successfully driving traffic, and which aren’t, so you can make improvements to your content:
You can add filters to these reports to show whether users are getting to your pages through organic search (SEO), paid channels like PPC, or through other marketing activities, like social media.
Within each of your locations’ Google Business Profiles, you can monitor the performance of each profile using the performance tab within the profile manager:
This performance report gives you valuable information about how customers are interacting with your profile, including:
As well as showing how customers have engaged with your profile, you can also see what keywords, phrases and enquiries your profile appears for (which can help you understand if you’re targeting the right keywords in your profile)
Google Search Console is another great free tool that provides a lot of insight into your area page performance, as well as highlighting potential errors that could be holding you back.
To track the performance of a local area landing page, you can filter this information in Search Console using a custom query called “regex”.
You can find this by going to Overview → search results
And then adding the regex filter in the “add filter” tab:
Just go to Query
Select Custom ‘regex’ from the dropdown menu
And then add your town or city into the keyword to see how this landing page is performing
In this report, you’ll be able to see how many impressions this page has got (how many times it appears in SERPs) and how many clicks have gone through to your site:
You can also check what keywords and searches these landing pages are appearing for (which can help inform your on-page SEO for your local business)
Google Search Console can also show you potential errors that could be damaging your local search performance. One particular thing to look at is the Core Web
Vitals report under the Experience tab.
In particular, it’s worth paying attention to how your website is performing on mobile.
Considering more than half of local business searches are done on a mobile device it’s important your pages are optimised for mobile search.
Along with these free performance tools, you can use paid-for SEO tools like Wincher or AHrefs.
These tools allow you to check your rankings for individual keywords and check what pages already rank for those queries.
This can be useful when it comes to comparing the content on competitor landing pages to yours.
If your competitors are outranking you, it’s worth looking at what information they include on their pages that you don’t, or what information is missing that you could add to get ahead of them.
You can read more about how to track and measure SEO success.
SEO for local businesses working in multiple locations isn’t just about scaling or reproducing service pages and Google Business Profiles.
It needs a strategy that approaches each business location or service area as its own individual business, with its own online presence that’s managed effectively.
Whether that’s through professional Google Business profiles or area-specific landing pages.
By investing properly in SEO for multiple-location businesses, you can get the benefits of customers finding you through organic search across every location and scale your business in every area you work in.
If you want to know about how our local SEO services can make you more visible across all your locations, get in touch.
Speak to a member of our team and start your project today!
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