As an owner of a multi-location business, you should want each location to rank in its respective service area. But how are you going to do that? A lot has been said about creating a separate article for each city, neighbourhood and service. But is this really the right local strategy? And what should the link structure look like?
Before we dive straight right into the answer, there’s one important thing to note here. If you are to create a separate article for service and area, you must ensure that this isn’t your only local search strategy. We’ve talked about the basic strategies comprehensively before, check them out here.
Say you’re in the cleaning service business. Wherever customers are searching for services like yours, you want to convert them immediately or direct them to your desired URL to learn more.
Let’s talk about the idea of having a separate article for each location and service.
Should I make local articles for each service & area?
That sounds like a lot of work and it doesn’t sound like a great user experience for your potential customers.
Articles and blog posts can be excellent top-of-funnel informational elements for raising brand awareness and promoting your business.
But let’s think first about the intent of local searchers who may be looking for cleaning services.
Some users may be especially curious to learn more about a specific service, how it works and so on. However, there are a lot of people who just want to know things like:
- How much will this cost?
- Do you provide service in my area?
- Is it possible to schedule a consultation?
- What are the opinions of those who have worked with you?
You don’t want them to have to comb through 800+ words of text to find the simple answers that could lead to a scheduled appointment, phone call or other desired action right away. It’s also a huge undertaking to gather enough unique information about each site to write an entertaining, high-quality article about it.
If you have the budget, creating content to suit various types of searcher intent in each location would be a good promotional strategy. However, articles should not be your primary, catch-all destination for local searches.
Make use of local landing pages instead
There are other, more appealing ways to deliver these answers than through an article. Examine the components of a good local landing page experience.
- An integrated map. This allows searchers to estimate how far they are from your business location and whether you service their area.
- An embedded video. This allows the potential visitors to get a quick overview of your facilities, equipment, techniques and employees.
- Local reviews. These can highlight your most recent customer feedback and provide social proof when and where they’re considering using your business.
- High-quality images. This can aid potential visitors in realising the experience you’re providing.
- Local content and offers. By providing these, the visitors’ informational and conversion needs can be met.
- Contact functionality. Make it easy for those who are ready to convert, by providing click to call, book or contact functionality (or even live messaging).
You can link to your more in-depth resources from here.
You can use your landing page template to develop specialty pages for specific services, business lines and so on. The most important thing is that your local pages are:
- Responsive.
- Search and conversion should be optimised.
- Designed to provide the next steps for a variety of local searches.
- Marked up with the relevant schema so Google understands how and why your page is the best answer for relevant queries
Get people to visit your local pages
Use a locator in order to help searchers in finding the exact location. Link back to the locator so customers will be able to get back and explore other locations and services.
Your locator can be displayed in the main menu and on the homepage, with each local page only a couple of clicks away. In this case, breadcrumbs are a useful navigational tool.
For your local pages, you may use a template to keep the look, feel and experience consistent while also minimising the workload to create them. Duplicate content will have no effect on your rankings so don’t worry if they’re generic at first and you can add localised content as you go. Include local landmarks and cross streets, provide images of the interior and exterior and explain any unique services provided by that location, etc.
Each Google Business Profile and online listing should also include a link to the appropriate local page. It’s a much better user experience than directing people to your homepage from a localised search.
Examine who else is ranking for the terms you want to dominate organically and locally. Competitors, information portals, local community organisations and media, directories, social content and others may fall into this category. Consider the following questions:
- Is it possible for me to outrank them?
- Can my business be listed or advertise with them?
- Is it possible to get them to link to my website?
If you can’t appear organically or in the top three MapPack results, you might consider running a local PPC campaign that directs consumers to the relevant page for that geographic area.
You can also utilise articles and blog posts to answer more informational questions and link them to your locator to discover the nearest location.
Get ready to manage your growing presence
Lastly, as a multi-location service-area company, you have some additional obstacles. It’s one thing to create all of this content and these landing pages. However, you must be able to keep everything accurate, measure engagement and performance and make edits and updates.
It’s not a bad idea to look into some local SEO tools and platform alternatives to make things easier.
It takes time to establish a local presence. You’ll be that much further ahead if you can automate some of the work of monitoring, updating and identifying new possibilities to arise.
Top4 Marketing understands how difficult franchise marketing campaigns can be. At the same time, we acknowledge how multi-location businesses and franchises open up tremendous opportunities for your business’s development. Top4 Marketing is your franchise digital marketing partner who can handle it all, from consistent branding and message to intricate reporting and tracking for each local or national site.
We provide clear strategies for each franchise website to dominate its local market and we are available to franchisees all over the world. We also provide extensive reporting and assign a dedicated account manager and a team of marketing experts. It’s a full-service, budget-friendly digital marketing solution that caters to all of your needs!
To optimise your multi-location business, join our location-based platform called Top4. By signing up to Top4, you can target several suburbs to dominate in local search.
To find out how we can help you with your Website + Marketing, using our unique location marketing platform called Top4, get in touch today at www.top4marketing.com
Looking to build customer loyalty through social media? Don’t forget to add your business to Top4.com.au
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