Tag: local seo

For local businesses looking to drive more traffic from their neighborhoods, it’s important to know what search ranking factors are the most important. Here’s some reasons why doing local SEO right is so important:

• Over 90% of consumers use online searches to find local businesses
• Almost half of all local searches involve clicks on the Map Pack

Let’s take a closer look at the top seven local SEO ranking factors and dive into what makes your local business rank in your neck of the woods. This data was pulled from a reputable local SEO industry study that has been going on since 2008.

Note that local SEO involves two parts- the Local Pack/Local Finder (or Map Pack) and Local Organic listings:

Here’s a sneakpeak at those local ranking factors:

Local Pack	Local Organic
1. Google Business Profile (36%)	1. On-page (34%)
2. Reviews (17%)	2. Links (31%)
3. On-page (16%)	3. Behavioral (11%)
4. Links (13%)	4. Citations (7%)
5. =Behavioral (7%)	5. =Personalization (6%)
5. =Citations (7%)	5. =GBP (6%)
7. Personalization (4%)	7. Reviews (5%)

Local Search Ranking Factors

As you can see in the table above, there are seven primary ranking factors for local SEO. These are correlational factors, so if you are going to be undertaking a local SEO campaign for your business, the recommended approach is to throw the kitchen sink at it and do everything to give your website the best chance of ranking number one in the Local Pack as well as Local Organic results for a variety of searches related to your business.

Since the ranking factors are evident across both the Local Pack and Local Organic, I’ll provide my recommended order of optimizations in terms of what to do for maximum business impact.

Google Business Profile Signals

The importance of a well-optimized Google Business Profile (aka Google My Business) cannot be overstated. Since 2017, the importance has nearly doubled as related to top rankings.

Thus, spending time optimizing your Google Busines Profile should be a primary area of focus. Setting this up is free at https://www.google.com/business/, and the process is fairly straightforward although it may be overwhelming for some (which is where you hire a local SEO agency).

Proper business categorization is one of the most important factors, as is the use of keywords in your business name (if applicable), as is the addition of relevant categories.

Review Signals

Reviews to your Google Business Profile are next in importance, although this is an ongoing strategy that you’ll want to focus on weekly. Review quantity, review velocity, and review diversity are all areas you want to focus on.

To get reviews, usually all you have to do is ask although I do recommend the use of automated review software that is triggered by some CRM. The uniqueness of each business makes it difficult to give a blanket recommendation, but basically you’ll want to text or email your customers a review link to make things easy.

On-page Signals

On-page SEO is where things get a little spicy and best handled by a pro but you can certainly give this a stab if you know your way around a website.

As much as I’d love to show you how to do on-page SEO for a local website, that would be a massive guide. On-page signals include things like keywords in titles, the domain authority of your website, and Name, Address, Phone number (NAP) consistency with that of your Google Business Profile.

Here are some top-level factors broken down:

City, State in Landing Page Title

Above all else, the city and state of your business’ physical location should be in the title tag of the pages you are trying to rank locally. For example, click-throughs of the top three dentists in my hometown, West Palm Beach, reveal that all of them have “Dentist West Palm Beach” in the homepage title tags. This makes sense as they want to rank for a fairly generic search [dentist LOCATION] but this principle would also apply to their internal pages. Ex. “Veneers Dentist West Palm Beach” as a title tag for the veneers page of a local dentist’s site.

City, State in Landing Page H1/H2 Tags

In addition to using the location in the title tags, you should also use them on the landing page. So, our veneers dentist has “Veneers Dentist West Palm Beach” as their title tag. They should also try to use those same terms on the landing page as an H1 and perhaps some other variations in the other tags (ex. “Best Veneers Dentist in West Palm Beach”) or something perhaps a little less cheesy.

Domain Authority of Website

Domain authority is a metric that has been defined by Moz to evaluate how strong an entire domain is. It is based on several metrics including link counts, linking root domains, MozRank and MozTrust (also Moz-centric ranking factors). 

The idea is that Google takes a lot of factors in to determine ranking and Moz’s domain authority is a reflection of this. Rather than focusing your efforts on all of Moz’s ranking factors you can just take a look at the other (Page Authority below is also a Moz metric) factors on this page as most of them are included in their analysis.

Page Authority of Landing Page URL

Page authority is a metric that analyzes how well an individual webpage (URL) will rank in the search engines. On one hand it is important to understand that having an authoritative domain is a good thing as is having individual pages that rank. For a local dentist for example, the above veneers example would be a page that you would want to rank for queries related to veneers in your location and is a reason why page authority would be helpful in that goal.

Product / Service Keyword in Website URL

This one is a bit confusing to a lot of marketing directors or business owners. The thing is many people have preexisting domains that don’t include the product or service keyword in their domain (ex. My website http://thedigitalelevator.com/ says nothing about SEO, web design or inbound marketing but nonetheless is a badass name). However, this does not mean that you can’t create a URL (ex. http://thedigitalelevator.com/local-seo) that includes your keywords.

Link Signals

Links are one of the most important factors for Local Organic rankings yet are one of the most difficult aspects of SEO to understand or strategize. Most SEO companies don’t even offer link building services (read: weaksauce) although links have increased in importance over the last several years.

In really competitive industries, this is simply not something you can afford to overlook.

Here are some ranking factors that are associated with link signals:

Quality/Authority of Inbound Links to Domain

Lots of inbound links (links from site A to your site B) go straight to the domain (ex. Site.com) rather than internal site pages (ex. Site.com/veneers). If people are going to be linking to your site then you want those links to come from high quality, authoritative sites. In short, get awesome links to your domain. Lots of em.

Quality/Authority of Inbound Links to Landing Page URL

See above except sub out your homepage (domain) for internal page (ex. Site.com/veneers). In short, get awesome links to the internal pages of your website you want to rank too. Lots of em.

Citation Signals

I’ll put citation building ahead of behavioral signals because citations are much easier to implement. Citation signals have decreased in importance significantly over the last few years, but at 7%, they are a must do in my book.

The quality and number of citations will play a role in how well your site ranks in the local map pack. Use Moz’s local business listing checker to claim citations that will help you rank better. Citations are sites like Google Places for Business, Yelp, FourSquare, Bing Locals, Best of the Web and many, many more. 

There are many local business listings services out there as well as paid business listings suggestions. Check out this write-up from BrightLocal offering a candid comparison of the main local citation service players. 

Behavioral Signals

Behavioral signals include click-through rate (CTR), mobile clicks to call, and dwell time. Behaviroal signals can best be influenced with actions geared to increase CTR or dwell time.

I have seen situations before where a website that ranked worse than competitors actually got more clicks. How can this be? Well, in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) you have the ability to manually adjust the way your results appear. You can adjust the title tags, meta descriptions and URLs to influence click-through (within your website). 

Not sure where to start? Just type in the terms you want to rank for and see what your competitors are doing. Can you craft a more compelling title tag and meta description that encourages a click more so than your competitors?

Also, the user experience (UX) on your website can influence dwell time (the length of time a person spends looking at a webpage after they’ve clicked a link on a SERP page, but before clicking back to the SERP results). If you have a beautiful, trustworthy website with clean navigation and easy-to-find information, you can increase the time visitors spend on your site, and effectively improve your chances of increasing dwell time and behavioral signals.

Have a crappy website? Talk to us.

Personalization Signals

Personalization is at the bottom of this list but is still a prominent ranking factor because it takes into account things related to the user: search history, search location, device, etc.

While you can’t manipulate this, it’s important to know that this is also why many businesses don’t rank as well as they think they should. For example, if you are a dry cleaner in Queens but think your location is close enough to Brooklyn that you should also rank there, you are probably getting dinged by the Personalization factor. 

Google takes into account a searchers proximity to your business when delivering search results and a poorly optimized business may rank better than you if their proximity is closer to the searcher.

This is related to the factor of having a Physical Address in City of Search.

This means you actually have an address in the city you are trying to rank in. If you don’t it is not likely that you’ll rank as well. Think about it. Google wants people who are looking for West Palm Beach dentists to find dentists in West Palm Beach. Sorry Lake Worth dentists, stay in your own territory!  

Local SEO Rankings Takeaways

The average person (non-SEO) would likely not understand half of the above which is why getting local SEO help can be very valuable to your business.

Here is what to know about local SEO for the layperson who wants some traction:

1. Start with solid on-page optimization– take some time to learn about title tags, meta descriptions, and keyword usage. Implement these into every page of the site with your newly tagged city, state and product/service rolled in. 
2. Build citations– build a sh*tload of citations. Consider using one of the citation services mentioned above. These citation metrics are analyzed by Google every six weeks and there is no telling when that six weeks begins or ends. Point is after you build all these citations it might take some time to be reflected in your rankings. 
3. Build links– build links to your domain and links to the internal pages you want to rank. Building links is hard. Building good links is even harder. Check out this post on one website that generated tons of links and traffic using The Skyscraper Technique. This same site has lots of other great advice on building links. 

Still hungry for Knowledge?

Check out the full list of Local Search Ranking Factors.

Want help from the pros? Learn more about Digital Elevator’s local SEO services.

If you are a brand, franchise, or a local brick-and-mortar with multiple locations or are opening your second location, this post is for you.

All too often, and this is often seen even with the biggest of brands, companies aren’t optimizing their local SEO for multiple cities the right way.

To be clear, we are talking about ranking for local search related to your business and the promise of ranking within Google’s map pack.

By the end of this post, you’ll know whether or not you are doing multilocation local SEO properly, or what you can do to fix it if you’re not.

The Importance of a Local Business SEO Strategy

According to a recent survey by our friends over at Brightlocal, 35% of consumers search for local businesses multiple times per week. And, this number is growing, it was 28% in 2020. To look at it another way, only 1% of consumers said they never use the internet to search for local businesses.

Plus, if the evidence for a review strategy isn’t enough to get all of your local businesses more search engine exposure, check out the data on online reviews that showcases that we trust the third-party opinions of others.

How to do SEO for Multiple Locations

Now that we’ve gotten some fun facts out of the way and you can use them to report to your CEO about why you need a bigger budget to fix all your local business issues, here’s how you can make moves to get to the top of the map pack for searches related to your business in your local area.

Optimized Individual Location Pages

This is perhaps the most erroneous multilocation SEO error. If you have one, centralized page for all of your locations, you need to take it a step further. Each one of your locations needs its own dedicated page that covers a specific city or region.

For multilocation SEO, each location needs it own URL for a specific or region (ex. /locations/location-a/). 

Yes, that means your locations page with the nifty search by city, state or zip feature is still not good enough.

Here’s an example of a company that did it wrong.

I performed a search for “Muscle Maker Grill Miami” and the top result was the Location page, NOT the specific location page:

This is because they don’t have specific locations pages.

Take the SEO element out of it for a moment and just consider the user experience element; when I as a user search for a specific business why should I have to go through multiple steps to find it?

The answer is, “you shouldn’t.” This can be solved by a dedicated page for the business that is located in the city I searched for.

Here’s an example of a company that did it right:

​You see, Starbucks’ various locations come up for the search, as they should. And if we click the website links in the map pack, we see that they link to individual company pages, not a central one:

We’ll refer back to this page as a good example later in the post.

To expand on this recommendation of a dedicated page for each location, make sure that your newly constructed individual pages are actually indexable by Google and other search engines. If Google can’t find these pages and index them, they won’t be able to deliver the results to users.

Quick input on local meta data

Title Tag Format:

Local geo-indicator | Article | Brand Name (ex. Biscayne Blvd. Miami Coffee Shop | Starbucks)

Meta Description Format:

You’ll want to shoot for about 150-160 characters and include your target location in the meta description. You may also want to add your phone number to cater to mobile searchers who want to quickly call.

H1 Heading:

You can use a similar tag here as you do with your title tag. (ex. Biscayne Blvd. Miami Coffee Shop)

Multiple Local SEO Domain & URL Strategy

In a recent and highly recommended Search Engine Land post by Andrew Beckman on the domain structure of multi-location SEO, we can summarize a few talking points that you’ll want to consider when creating your domain structure and URLs for your locations.

Beckman discusses what are called “centralized” and decentralized” multilocation SEO strategies. The Starbucks example of what to do above, is centralized, meaning the franchise or top of the chain manages how their local businesses are managed.

This is in comparison to a decentralized local SEO strategy where local businesses under a brand are free to create their own website landing pages and domains instead of keeping them centralized on one domain like Starbucks does.

Here’s some examples from the Search Engine Land post of why the decentralized approach is a bad strategy.

​The above domain is an example of a branded domain with a geographic modifier, the “lakeworth-westpalm” portion of the domain. What would have been better is:

lawndoctor.com/locations/lakeworth-westpalm/

In this case, the Sports Clips franchise doesn’t make mention of the brand in their domain whatsoever. They, unfortunately, were given the freedom to create their own domain, geo-modified for their Glendale, CO area.

Recommended URL:

sportsclips.com/locations/glendale-co/

Why a Decentralized Local SEO Strategy is not What You Want

The post mentioned goes into a lot of detail on this, so I will summarize why decentralized is not good for a multilocation local SEO strategy:

Recommended URL Strategy for Multiple Locations

Here’s what your multiple location URL strategy should look like:

This is the page that mentions all of your locations.

examplesite.com/locations/

This is a page of a specific location.

examplesite.com/locations/location-a/

*Notice the locations are in the sub-directory, not the sub-domain (glendale.examplesite.com).

Using the Extra Mile Approach for Multi-Location SEO

The Extra Mile Approach I am about to discuss is definitely one of those things you have to determine based on your personal needs. When trying to rank a location, you’re challenged not only by the proper setup of all that is mentioned on this blog post, but also the competition of the local businesses you are trying to outrank.

Your website may already have the advantage of being “centralized” and having a bunch of subdomains and a site that has an excellent Domain Authority, therefore increasing the likelihood all your locations will rank in their respective areas.

However, let’s say you have a location that just is not making the cut although you’ve done everything right. You may have to go the extra mile and create what is essentially a micro-site around the location.

Before we get into that, here’s why your local competitors might be outranking you.

Let’s say a local non-multilocation business has a website and is doing local SEO. Every page on their site is likely optimized for that location/city, sending Google lots of signals that help it rank for all types of searches related to that business.

Your multi-location business, however, only has one page dedicated to the location (examplesite.com/locations/location-a/), providing you much less opportunity to push the same local signals as the mom and pop down the street.

The Extra Mile Approach, and solution to this, is the micro-site or sub-pages of your sub-page. Let’s look at an example of what this would look like for you:

Right now, you have one local SEO page for one of your business locations:

examplesite.com/locations/location-a/

But, you need to give this location some more juice so it ranks, so you build out more content around it on additional pages, using the existing URL structure:

This type of content will provide lots of additional geo-targeted content that allows you to compete with the other websites that have tons of other local search signals you might have been missing out on. Some ideas for these sub-sub-pages:

Admittedly, the Extra Mile Approach for local multi-location SEO is time-consuming. But done properly, it will surely make more people drive the “extra mile” to come to your business instead of the other guy.

Google My Business for all Your Locations

The next step after setting up your locations on separate sub-directories is creating (or updating) Google My Business (GMB) pages so that they point to your new sub-directories.

A common error I see with brands big and small is that they point the link in the GMB profile to their homepage. Google clearly states in their local guidelines that you should “provide one website that represents your individual business location.”

Optimizing Your Google My Business pages

Make sure all your business page information is the exact same as on your GMB page.

Name: This is to be your exact business name, not the business name and location. Look at the Starbucks example above, the locations are all called “Starbucks,” not “Starbucks Miami” or “Starbucks Biscayne Blvd.”

Address: The website should be an actual brick-and-mortar location and be consistent with how it appears on other websites and your website. Don’t use P.O. Boxes or your friend’s business address in another city to appear bigger than you are (Google will find out).

Phone: You’ll want a local, dedicated phone number, per location, listed in your GMB. If the business has one phone number for all locations, you’ll run into trouble. You can always try to get a Google Voice phone number and forward it if you must.

URL: As mentioned, this should be the URL of your individual location page (examplesite.com/locations/location-a/), not your homepage.

Categories: Choose the most accurate category for your business as the primary category. Don’t go all bananas choosing multiple sub-categories thinking you’ll rank for everything; you won’t. Check out this (somewhat unknown) common category list.

Complete Profile: Make sure to complete as much of your profile as possible. Logos, photos, business hours, fax, etc. Everything you can to help your potential customers, and Google, out.

Consistency: For multiple locations of the same category, ensure your categories are the same for location-to-location.

Citation Management: NAP

After you’ve properly setup your website and optimized your Google My Business pages, now it’s time to build citations. The most important thing you’ll hear SEOs talk about with citations management is “NAP,” which refers to Name, Address, and Phone number.

The NAP is important because consistently having the same NAP on all your citations helps you rank. Not doing so hinders your ranking ability. This is important because some citation sites will pull data from other areas, called aggregators, and this information can often be incorrect.

For example, say you start claiming citations and you notice that Yelp has a listing for you already. Thing is, maybe the phone number is wrong. There is an obvious human element here that should be a major concern (you don’t want people calling the wrong phone number), but you don’t want Google to index all these listings of yours and see that they are consistently inconsistent.

This will affect your ability to rank locally, which is why a citation campaign often involves two aspects:

How do you manage citations you ask? Well, there are a number of local SEO resources that will help you do this:

How Many Citations Should I Build Per Location?

As many as it takes for you to rank is the simple answer. At Digital Elevator, we traditionally build about 80 citations for our clients, mixing the high-power citations (like Yelp, Bing, YellowPages) with niche, local directory listings.

Take the SEO element out of it for a second and consider how important it is for your business to appear properly across the web. Many of these citation sites – Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie’s List – get millions of visits, so it pays to be featured in all the possible locations your potential customers might be hanging out.

Put in the SEO element, and you’ll be a rock star in search engines and on these other sites.

Local Business Reputation Management & Reviews

You heard it here first, good SEO doesn’t fix bad business. If you knock on your SEOs door and you have a local business with 3-star (or lower) average ratings, don’t expect a quick fix.

Here’s some further proof that online reviews are an important aspect of your local multilocation SEO strategy:

As you can see in the graph above, reviews are the second most important aspect of ranking in the local map pack and the seventh most important aspect in local organic rankings.

Local SEO Review Strategy

Without going all willy-nilly into what you should do, I like the approach of the following strategy that we often use for our clients:

I find this approach works well for pushing reviews to the sites that people want to use. It also alleviates some of the low reviews you might get because people always like to know that a company cares about them.

You can also take an easier route and try to automate reviews with a text messaging-based application such as Birdeye or Klaviyo.

I recommend sending customers a direct Google My Business reviews link. Check out Whitespark’s free tool to create these links.

Multilocation SEO FAQs

What is multiple location SEO?

Multiple location SEO is the process of ranking each of your business’s locations for the respective geographic region with the goal of top rankings in search engine results pages.

How do I optimize SEO for multiple locations?

The steps to optimize your website for multiple locations are summarized as follows:

1. Setup and optimize Google My Business for each location
2. Create a location page on your website for each location
3. Link Google My Business locations to the respective website pages
4. Get reviews to each location

Do location pages help SEO?

According to reputable industry surveys, location pages are the third most important aspect of ranking in the local maps and the most important part of ranking in organic results.

How do you add multiple locations on Google?

Simply login to Google My Business and click the “Add business” button. You’ll have the option to add a single business or add multiple businesses via a downloadable template.

Do Local Multilocation SEO Like a Pro

Now that you are armed with a wealth of data of what to do and what to avoid, you’ll be able to fix or optimize all your listings going forward. If you have a lot of locations, you may find that the hardest step is getting started, not optimizing your website, Google Pages, building citations, and boosting reviews.

If you need help with your multilocation local SEO strategy, reach out to Digital Elevator today to learn how we can help you.