It goes without saying franchises and businesses located in multiple geographical areas benefit from having individual location pages for each of their facilities. However, don’t forget these location pages, which are nothing but local listing, require proper search engine optimisation. That is the only way new clients will find your business and help it grow. However, more importantly, a properly optimised local listing page will give a boost to your organic search engine ranking, as well.
Importance of SEO for Local Listing
Before you decide local listing SEO is not your cup of tea, take a look at the benefits this listing can bring to your business, specially if it is optimised for search engines.
- Brand Building: One of the problems that local multi-unit businesses face is creating a brand name for themselves. Optimising your location page actually allows you to build your brand and raise awareness about your brand among your target audience.
- Building Authority: One of the best ways to make your business credible is by ensuring your local landing page has optimised and informative content that visitors can find easily. Most people, when looking for a product, service or information, don’t have the time to scour the search engine results. They may look through the first couple of pages and then change their search term. Hence, it is important to be found and SEO gives you that opportunity. Once you rank high for specific search terms (or shall we say keywords and phrases), your business will be found and this helps to build your authority and credibility in your niche.
- Organic Traffic: Sites that receive organic traffic are viewed more favourably by search engines. Hence, if your SEO is right, you’ll attract organic traffic that will boost your search engine ranking and this will complete the circle of being found by your target audience.
- Increased Conversions: Whether you sell a product or service, the end result of your location page is to convert website visitors into paying customers. This is possible with high quality content and having the right SEO in place, so that you can target visitors and then increase conversion.
Bringing it All Together
Once you have location pages, it is important to include them in your main website’s sitemap. This, unfortunately, is ignored by businesses and franchises. Furthermore, the sitemap should be optimised to make it easy for search engines to find your local pages and index them.
Thereafter, focus on cross linking your existing webpages that are highly ranked to your local listing pages. However, your work is not yet over. All the sitemaps and cross-linkings will be of no value if your local landing pages do not have authoritative content. Select geo-modified keywords and phrases and service-specific keyword and then optimise each location page.
Make sure the local page has the name, address and contact number of the local business unit along with high-value content that is local in nature. You can even give directions to your visitors by naming popular landmarks and areas to further optimise the page locally.
However, if you multiple location pages, it makes sense to use a quality CMS that allows easy and convenient editing, modification and publishing of content. It usually is prudent to give each store or business access to your content management system, so that all changes and additions can be made locally, with the final approval lying with the head of the business marketing team.
Blog It!
While most franchises and multi-location businesses focus on a single corporate blog, this is not the way forward. Instead the focus should be on creating a blog page for each location that offers local visitors content that they can relate to. This further optimises local landing pages and adds value to the pages by making them more visitor-centric.
If your business is spread in different locations, local landing pages are a must. But they should be properly optimised for search engines as well as the target audience.
