5 local seo tips for multi-location businesses

Corporate marketing is at a tipping point. Online presence and branding across all online platforms and locations is important, regardless of the size of your business or the number of locations you serve. The local search engine optimization (local SEO) tactics you employ through these channels can have a significant impact on how (and where) your business appears online.

Results from the Local Consumer Review Survey conducted by Bright Local show that 90% of consumers trust online platforms to find local businesses. The report also notes that 87% of local searches are “need it now” queries. Prosperous Deep Dive Badge

So what does this mean for multisite businesses? These reports show that to be successful in the digital landscape, you need to appear in Google’s search results.

Shannon Thammasiene, Senior SEO Manager at Thrive, said: “This allows search engines to distinguish between different locations and present the right place to the right person at the right time.”

Gone are the days when a customer simply visits a company’s girlfriend’s website to find the information they need. Today, when users search for brands, the results are displayed in the form of digital company profiles along with company URLs. To appear in Google Business Listings, you must implement local SEO tips to help your business rank in multiple locations. Before we delve deeper into local SEO, let’s first define a multi-location company.

What is a multi-site company?

Multi-site companies are service providers or product dealers serving a variety of sectors. A multisite business is considered if:

• Many physical stores or locations
• Even if you don’t have a store, we offer services in various regions
• You are the local business directory

If you have a multisite business, there are many things to consider. Are all franchise stores the same brand? Do all locations offer the same product or service? Are locations distributed by county or state? The answers to these questions are very important for your online marketing campaign. You need to integrate your franchise SEO and digital marketing strategy to grow your online presence in all your business locations. Additionally, each site must be properly exposed online.

The problem is, for companies with multiple locations, ranking high in Google search results can seem like an impossible feat. But don’t worry. The secret to local search rankings is local search optimization.

What Is Local SEO?

Local search engine optimization helps businesses build their brand’s online visibility and engage with prospects and existing customers within a geographic area. The goal of local SEO for multiple locations is to get indexed on the first page of search results for each target location.

What is the Difference Between Local SEO and Organic SEO?

The main difference between local and organic search is the intent.

If a user searches for product + location, the search engines know that the query has local intent. For instance, if you search for “digital marketing agency + Cameroon,” the following local results will show up under the ads on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs).

The goal of a multi-location business is to appear on the first page of search results for a specific target location.

For large and established organizations, combining business SEO services with a franchise marketing strategy is the best way to put your brand in front of your target audience. This is how you position your business in front of your customers at every stage of their buying journey.

The role of search engine optimization for businesses is to determine all viable aspects of an online marketing solution. This includes website structure, search presence, and social media presence. Organic SEO, on the other hand, occurs when searches have no local intent. The user’s purpose is to obtain information about a specific product or service, not a specific location. For example, if you search for “best of her PPC services”, the search engine will show you the best and most relevant pay-per-click services.

A strong franchise SEO marketing and corporate SEO strategy is required to rank in both local and organic search. Search engines analyze hundreds of factors to rank and index his website for search queries. This includes outbound and inbound links, keywords, and content.

If you want your multisite business to rank locally and organically, you need to show search engines that your business is the right answer to their users’ queries. To achieve this, your business and products must be relevant to specific search queries.

This is where local SEO for franchises comes into play.

What is the Importance of Local search engine marketing?

If you’ve got got a multiple-vicinity enterprise, neighborhood seo is an exquisite manner to marketplace your emblem to particular goal places and benefit web website online traffic. Search engines want to understand your genuine organisation cope with so that after clients look for a vicinity, they are able to locate your enterprise.

Here are greater motives neighborhood search engine marketing is essential on your multi-vicinity enterprise’ success:

• 70% of clients go to a shop primarily based totally at the statistics they locate on-line (Google)
• Google searches that contain “close to me” have expanded 34X considering that 2011
• More than 50 percentage of “close to me” searches bring about a shop go to (Mediapost)
• Franchise search engine marketing sports assist construct on-line visibility and increase recognition at a neighborhood stage
• Greater neighborhood visibility manner expanded foot traffic, greater clients and greater income
• 50 percentage of customers who behavior cell searches for a neighborhood enterprise will go to the shop inside one day (Search Engine Land) — and 18 percentage of those searches result in a purchase (Think with Google)
• Local content material advertising improves enterprise relevance

With the internet at their fingertips, consumers expect instant, relevant search results when they need them. More importantly, customers are increasingly demanding products and services that are unique to their location.

If you are an entrepreneur, the implications are clear.
Whether you are a small business or a global brand, you need to meet the specific needs of your consumers.

Strict adherence to corporate marketing and local SEO best practices is critical to achieving profitable results.

Large-scale local search optimization

challenge of local seo

Without the expertise, knowledge, and resources, local search optimization can be difficult. Some business owners see multi-location companies as a disadvantage when it comes to creating strong customer experiences online. This is primarily because a single-location company has only one target market to analyze, one reputation to maintain, and one online presence to manage.

To stay competitive, you need to deliver the same hyperlocal digital experience to your customers everywhere.

solutions to local seo

Optimize your local search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to better reflect the different locations of your business. Here’s how to boost your local SEO at scale.

1. Create a location page.

Some companies with multiple locations mistakenly put all their information on one master landing page. This can hinder your local SEO strategy.

You should create a separate optimized page for each location of your business. Creating a dedicated page increases your chances of ranking in local searches. Here’s how to start a site-specific page:

Conduct extensive keyword research. This helps you understand user intent, search queries, and how much you can track if they rank higher for that keyword.

“Understand the types of searches people are entering, the search volumes, and the types of competition,” Thammasiene said. “[Keyword research] helps you decide which keywords to start with. It’s one of the most fundamental parts of any SEO strategy.”

Valuable metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, competition, cost-per-click should be tracked and analyzed.

Tools you can use to track these results include the Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool, SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs. ▢ Conduct SERP research. SERPs are the pages displayed by search engines in response to user queries.

SERP research is essential to understanding user intent. Different types of queries have different intents. These include:

⇾ Navigation search queries — these are search queries aimed at finding a specific website. For example, a user may search Google for “Thrive Internet Marketing Agency” instead of typing a URL into their browser’s navigation bar.

The key is to make it easier for your target customers to find your official business website in search results.

⇾ Information searches – these are searches that cover a wide range of topics such as: B. SEO or Digital Marketing. Informational queries are difficult to monetize.

The best way to target these searches is with a strong content marketing strategy. You should post compelling content to answer the most common user requests, such as: B. How-to guides, step-by-step guides, and tips.

The goal is to position local businesses as a reliable source of information.

⇾ Transactional Queries – These are queries that indicate an intent to complete a transaction. B. Purchasing Products or Subscribing to Newsletters.

Transactional queries are most likely to generate her ROI in paid search.

SERP research is now essential to understanding the difference between blog post and landing page content. Apart from that, you should also be aware of different types of results such as: videos, photos, etc.

This allows you to assess whether the keywords you are trying to rank for are relevant to your target audience. Understanding user intent can help you outperform your competitors.

▢ Conduct a competitive analysis. This allows you to organize your SEO campaign priorities. Onsite and offsite franchise SEO strategies should be considered when conducting a competitive analysis.

⇾ Onsite SEO — Compare your rankings and content to your competitors. Identify content opportunities that can outperform your competitors and incorporate them into your content strategy.

⇾ Offsite SEO – Conduct competitive backlink analysis. This way, you can identify your competitors’ quality backlinks and add them to your link building strategy. Related links help strengthen your relationship of trust with Google. ▢ Create a logical URL structure. This method makes your website clearer, easier to use, and more understandable for search engines.

Make sure the URL is region-specific for each location. Here’s an example of how to create a logical URL structure for your multisite business.

⇾ List of all locations:

example.com/locations/

⇾ List of all locations in a particular state:

example.com/locations/douala/

⇾ List of locations in a specific city:

example.com/locations/texas/akwa

When creating your URL structure, you need to ensure that each specific site page will be crawled and indexed by search engines.

Thammasiene said: “You have to stick to one system and maintain consistency across the board, because if you start shutting down later, it can be very confusing for his users online and for yourself.”

2. Optimize your website for local seo search traffic.

To increase traffic from your local catchment area, you need to improve your SEO, content, and conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Onsite SEO:

There are two schools of thought when it comes to SEO.
Onsite SEO and offsite SEO. Onsite SEO refers to everything you can find on your website.
It is essential that you conduct onsite optimization to rank well on search engines and improve your website’s overall readability for your target customers.

Here are some guidelines when revamping your website:

⇾ Include target keywords in the title tag, metadata and headers
⇾ Strategically position exact match keywords and latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords throughout the content
⇾ Use geo-targeted keywords
⇾ Create a separate page for each service, product and location
⇾ Use local business, organization, product and service schema, where applicable
⇾ Show your business’ name, address and phone (NAP) on your website
⇾ Optimize site images
⇾ Boost your internal linking strategies
⇾ Optimize your site speed
⇾ Optimize your website for mobile devices
⇾ Create an SEO-optimized sitemap

Content optimization for local seo:

After augmenting your site structure, you need to add localized content to your website. Make sure you publish useful, compelling content that your customers would want to know.

The first step is to determine your audience and identify their pain points.

“How does the product or service that you offer solve their pain points?” Thammasiene said. “If possible, think from their point of view and what differentiates you from your competitors.”

You can’t provide valuable solutions to your customers’ needs if you don’t address their biggest challenges.

Let’s dive into a few different methods you can serve your customers better through content optimization. Here are some ideas to consider:

⇾ Find the balance between writing for Google and writing for humans
⇾ Insert keywords throughout the content seamlessly and avoid keyword stuffing
⇾ Avoid industry jargons
⇾ Breakdown information into bite-sized pieces to make it more scannable
⇾ Incorporate images and videos
⇾ Create a strong emotional response from your readers
⇾ Develop comprehensible content
⇾ Interlink to your service pages and blog posts

Once you’ve delivered your brand’s unique selling points (USPs), include a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) at the end of the content.

“Decide what your goals are and make sure that your calls-to-action align with those goals,” Thammasiene said.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO):

This pertains to the process of modifying certain site elements to increase the percentage of your site visitors and convert them into customers.

“The goal in conversion rate optimization is to encourage users to avoid any roadblocks to the final destination,” Thammasiene said. “If your website goal is to get more calls, you need to optimize.”

Here are some of the best practices you can follow to create high-converting landing pages.

⇾ Simplify submission forms
⇾ Only ask customers for relevant information
⇾ Insert specific call-to-action text and buttons
⇾ Use backgrounds, layouts, and headlines that grab your audience’s attention
⇾ Strategically integrate slide shows and videos
⇾ Look away and avoid elements that are not directly related to the purpose of your website, such as: B.Slider
⇾ Use upselling, cross-selling and personalization

Overall, the key to converting website visitors into actual customers is creating landing pages that resonate with your target audience.

3. Create and optimize Google My Business profiles for each location.

Google My Business (GMB), now called Google Business Profile, is a valuable tool that allows you to manage how your business appears on Google Search and Google Maps.

Applying for a GMB listing is a relatively straightforward process. If your franchise SEO business has more than 20 locations, you can use Bulk Manage Locations to import and manage new locations. Follow these guidelines to streamline all your business information everywhere.
There are guidelines available on Google for certain multi-site properties, including: B. Chains and Brands, Institutions and Private Practitioners. Follow these guidelines to create a successful listing.

4. Use local business listings for each location.

Claiming your business listing in local directories in each location is essential for maximum SEO visibility. It should be listed on all popular websites related to your niche.

Also, make sure your company’s NAP is consistent across the web. This includes small differences such as commas, periods, and abbreviations such as “St” used in one place and spelled “Street” in another.

Remember, search engines are all about trust, credibility and authority.

“Search engines basically make their money by providing the best results for their users,” he says Thammasiene. “So if you’re not giving users the best results, or if you can’t prove to Google that you’re confident, they won’t see your listing.”

5. Promote positive local reviews.

Research shows that 88% of his customers trust online reviews. To appeal to this market and get more positive reviews online, she needs to make it as easy as possible for customers to leave reviews on her website.

Below are some tips you can follow.

▢ Ask now
▢ Ask for help
▢ Offer incentives
▢ Using the service
▢ Reply to reviews

Star ratings and user comments appear directly on your Google Business Profile or Google My Business listing. The more positive reviews you get, the higher chances you have of attracting your target customers to your location.

PRO TIP:
Partner with a reputable digital marketing agency with a proven track record of successful local SEO campaigns. Do your research before hiring an enterprise SEO company to avoid agency hopping.

Some more tips to get your local and enterprise-level SEO started:

⇾ Ensure you have a highly organized system for all your login credentials
⇾ Keep track of all logins for your Google Business Profile listings, Google Analytics, Search Console, website and hosting
⇾ Stay abreast of the latest updates in Google’s guidelines and best practices

Target More Qualified, Local Traffic For Local SEO Purposes

Optimize your multiple-location business for local search and never miss a customer! Tell us your business goals, and we will create local SEO strategies tailored to your company’s specific needs and requirements.

Schedule a call with our digital marketing managers today. Get started with local search engine optimization for your multi-location business!