Having a business website is more than just having it made and looking nice. The website itself needs to be useful for anyone who stumbles upon it. That is if you want your website to rank highly in online searches. You need to make sure that you have good Search Engine Optimization. No matter whether you have a small local business or a multi-location one, your SEO needs to be perfect. Many businesses would say maintaining a local SEO in a good shape is easy. But most businesses that are having issues with local SEO are multi-location businesses. Having multiple locations and still managing to have a good local SEO is a true challenge. So we figured you might need some help from experts. As we are just that, we decided to write an article talking about the five issues that are wrecking local SEO for multi-location businesses.
Why local SEO is important even for multi-location businesses?
Let’s first go over the topic of why local SEO is important even though you are a multi-location business. Well, in order to have a generally good SEO, your local SEO needs to be in good shape.
People are searching on Google for things they need in their surroundings by adding “near me” to their search. This is exactly why you need to have a good local SEO – so that your business pops up when someone searches something related to it adding this “near me” while searching. But when you have a multi-location business, you have to make sure that you do this right for every location you have. This can mean wrecking local SEO for one location while making it good for another.
If you are experiencing such an issue, below is where you can read just what are the things wrecking local SEO.
5. GoogleMyBusiness (GMB)
One of the first places to head over to if you notice somethings is wrecking your local SEO is Google My Business. If you have had a business website for a while, certainly you have used GMB and you know how helpful it is. But it can also do the opposite of help if you do not use it the right way.
The first thing you have to check is that for each one of your locations you have the same name set. The name is very important. This is not the field where you should be putting anything but the name of your business. A lot of multi-location businesses make this mistake – they put the address by the name in order to “separate” the locations. This is not the right way to go. Almost every piece of information in GMB has to be the same for each of the locations, except the address of course.
4. Citations
In short, citations are mentions of your business across the internet. And your job is to make sure that all of them are correct. This can be a difficult task for a small business even. And if you have a multi-location one, it becomes even harder. This is where we can jump in and help. We AZ Citation Services can manage your citations if you do not know how to do it yourself or you find it to be a hard thing to do.
3. Website not working properly
Another thing wrecking local SEO is website issues. You need to have a good website in order for it to be recognized by Google as one that is reliable and gives the best user experience. This is why you need to make sure that your website has as minimal issues as that is possible. This isn’t an easy task which is why hiring professionals for the job is the best thing to do.
As you are a multi-location business, we advise you have a page for each and every one of your locations. Having separate pages instead of having one where they are all listed makes your local SEO much better. So, if you do not have a website with such a feature, chances are you are wrecking local SEO this way. This is one of the 10 ways to improve your Google rank.
2. Reviews
No matter what you do, having a page on your website dedicated to real reviews from your customers is a good way to make your SEO better. But just how can reviews wreck your local SEO? Well, if they are bad, you can assume just how they are wrecking not only your SEO but your business as well. This is why you need to encourage your customers to leave reviews if they are satisfied with your services. Do this for each location as it will help your local SEO. It is a good idea trying to get some national reviews as well. Reviews help your local SEO in many ways, so find a way to gather some good, honest and real reviews.
1. Linking strategy
As you know, linking is very important for SEO. When working on your local SEO and avoiding wrecking local SEO, you need to make sure that you have a well-thought-out strategy. You can hire professionals to do this for you. It is best to do so as you really need to find good links to include. And they need to be links that are coming from good quality websites that also have good linking strategies. This will be helping both you and the website of which you have gathered the links.
