Take a quick look at your local electrician’s or plumber’s website. You’ll often find that these service providers offer services across multiple cities or counties. Local SEO is a powerful tool for business, and it’s often easier to target local keywords than it is to target keywords for a larger county or state.
But when working in multiple locations, it’s important to include proper SEO tactics:
Create Location Pages for Each Location
If you have different office locations, you can start by creating location-specific content for these pages. For example, let’s assume that you have a business location in Chicago and another in Springfield.
You’ll be able to do one of a few things:
- Create a website for both of the locations
- Create separate pages for each location
You can create a page for Chicago with all of your staff’s pictures, testimonials, reviews and address information.
And for Springfield, you would do the same thing.
The goal is to promote both of your offices, so a structure may look like this:
- /chicago/staff
- /chicago/electrical-service
- /springfield/staff
- /springfield/electrical-service
You can see this in action on NE Pipe. Navigate to the Locations tab and you’ll see separate pages for all of the services that they offer in different states and many different cities.
What’s very important is that you change the copy of the pages. You don’t want to have the same copy on all of your Springfield and Chicago pages – that’s not good practice. Instead, you’ll want to have different, targeted copy on pages to offer a better chance of coming up in the search results.
Small businesses that are just starting out can start with pages for the main, largest service area first before moving on.
Don’t forget to keep general NAP (name, address, phone number) information on every page for all major locations. You want every visitor to your website to know that you offer services in each location, so it’s important to keep this information in the header or footer of every page.
The more information you provide, the better.
Create Business Listings for All Locations
If you have multiple offices and locations, you should leverage this on business listing sites. Yelp, for example, should have listings for your Chicago office and Springfield office if it exists. The same goes for your Google My Business listing.
You’ll need to provide all of your business’ information on these pages, such as operating hours, phone number and address.
The goal is to be in as many places as possible, so if you have multiple locations, start to add your listings to as many reputable places as possible.
All locations will need their own business locations listed on business listings.
Reviews for Different Listing Locations
Reviews drive customers to your business’ doors. When you have no reviews, this is going to have a negative impact on your business. This is a major problem when adding new offices or service locations.
So, what can you do?
A great way to start generating reviews is to use your existing customers. If you have your customers’ email addresses, you can do the following:
- Send a follow up email after the service was completed
- Ask that the customer leave a review after their service
When you do this, you’re letting your customers know that you care about their experience and want to see if anything could have been better. And, if the service was good, ask that the client leave a review on the right location’s page.
I recommend segmenting email lists into location so that you can send out location-based discounts and follow up emails in the future.
Statistics show that 68% of customers will read four or more reviews. If you’re lacking reviews, these potential customers may choose your well-reviewed competitors.
Your next step is more difficult, and this includes properly optimizing your search engine optimization strategy for each location. This means that you’ll need to expand your marketing budget as well as do more marketing for each page.
A proper interlinking structure and strategy can help ease this burden a little and leverage your existing marketing results to your benefit.
While not always easy, optimizing for local SEO can provide better overall results in an online marketing campaign and provide your business with highly targeted leads; leads that convert at a much higher rate.
