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Local SEO with Multiple Locales
By Matt McGee | September 13, 2007
As Marchex’s SEO Manager, I’m always interested in local search industry trends, but I tend to spend more time on the hands-on, strategical and tactical side of local search. When working with external clients (through our TrafficLeader subsidiary), my focus is on how to help businesses acquire traffic from local search.
Here’s a common problem we see: A business with multiple locations and a Web site that doesn’t adequately serve each location. This could apply to a big retailer with stores across the country, a mid-sized law firm with a handful of offices in the same state, or a small restaurant with a couple locations in the same town.
In each case, local search optimization requires a lot more than the standard “put your address in the footer of every page on your site.” Well, what if you have five addresses?
Chris Silver Smith writes a great article about this dilemma today on Search Engine Land. He explains why the hotel industry is a great example of using local search tactics when “local” involves more than one location: Because every hotel location in the chain gets its own locally-optimized page.
That’s the key: individual pages for each location. You can’t have just one page on your site listing all your locations, and expect it to rank well for every town or city name.
Topics: Local SEO |
September 13th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
[…] That’s the topic of my first post at LocalPoint: Local SEO with Multiple Locales. […]
September 14th, 2007 at 12:20 am
Hi Matt, I’ve been reading my smallbusinessem.com blog for ages.
In my experience, this area is one a potential gold mine (and most frequently ignored) by many franchises etc with multiple locales.
The crazy thing is that’s its easy to do - in Australia local search terms have relatively little competition - here’s what we’ve been doing for a client here in Australia - turning his store listings page into local search landing pages.
http://mcwebs.com.au/articles/case-studies/increasing-website-traffic-by-275-without-spending-a-cent-more.html
Regards
Cameron
September 14th, 2007 at 9:19 am
That’s a great case study, Cameron — a perfect example of how to deal with this situation. The chart at the bottom: wow! Can’t argue with results.
September 14th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Nice Post, and I like the concept of the new blog as well. As a stock holder it’s nice to see a company expanding and showing how it is a leader in it’s business….keep up the good work y’all.
Will
September 14th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Thanks for the encouragement - keep up the good writing.
January 8th, 2008 at 12:16 am
I have to say that I have indeed had one home page that was optimized for 6 cities and indeed I go the rankings in the top 3 for each. It was a real estate website and I focused on about 5 keyword phrases and the 6 cities. After about 3 months (first 3 in the sandbox) the rankings shot up like a rocket, even displacing several websites that had several years seniority. I must say it was an exhilarating feeling.
Now I must say that you could have individual pages for each city you were focusing on, but then I’d be o\awful tempted to duplicate the text and substitute the city name/location to save from duplicating work. Now I would be afraid of being penalized by mother Google et al.
The one thing I did do was create links on the main page to each city name and then do a city history blurb on each of those pages, no replication of content there.
I suppose it can be a viable option if you are in the business because it allows you to charge more. However,I am not convinced that it is entirely necessary to achieve top rankings, in fact I know that it’s not.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
I wanted to say that I did not mean for the above closing to sound so snobby.
Now, the more I think about this, rather than relying on the IP and taking a chance (even at 80%) of getting the correct locale, I am leaning toward having the site visitor enter their own choice of locations, and here is why.
In the case of a hotel or restaurant, let’s assume we will be traveling and want to find hotel rates in Peoria, IL and we are not going to use one Priceline.com, Travelocity or any other online booking service. I would want that selection to be presented to me by BestWestern.com or HolidayInn.com rather than having it bring up Seattle. Not that it hurts anything I suppose, because you still have to change to the correct content. Although most of those situations are all database driven - other than presenting a purty picture of Peoria.
Now I am having internal conflict and will have to result to case-by-case decisions. “Johnny 5 needs more input!”