Best Practices for Local Branches of a Much Larger Business

[Mike Wilton]

I recently changed roles and am no longer working with indvidual doctors and small businesses and now face much larger local troubles in the form of larger corporations with locations across the nation. With that said I am wondering what best practices are for larger companies when it comes to local. I see a few problems as I face this.

1) They can target local with individual pages within the site optimized for that location, but then they will be limited on the number of terms they could ultimately target with just a single page on the location.

2) Individual websites would be the best option because they can target multiple keywords because it will be a full site, but obviously it creates bandwidth issues when it comes to the ability for the company to manage that many sites.

So what are your thoughts folks? What are some of the best practices you follow when it comes to local SEO for larger companies with multiple locations throughout the U.S.?

 

[Phil Rozek]

I think it depends (1) what type of company it is / what their services are, (2) how many cities you?re trying to reach, and (3) whether you?re going for Google+Local or organic rankings (or some combination of the two. If they have 20 locations and 10 very different services they?d like to rank for, I don?t know that it?s practical or effective to have 200 pages ? on several sites or on one site.

That's not much in the way of specifics, I know...maybe you could throw in more detail?

Congrats on the ?role change?!

 

[Mike Wilton]

In this particular case it was a landscaping company that offers a variety of services when it comes to landscaping. Architectural landscaping, tree trimming, etc. Another was for pest control, again multiple services all under the same business type bucket.

In both cases there are very much local ties in queries and also in what google displays in the SERPs. Hope that helps, let me know if you need more info and I'll provide what I can.

 

[Phil Rozek]

In this particular case it was a landscaping company that offers a variety of services when it comes to landscaping. Architectural landscaping, tree trimming, etc. Another was for pest control, again multiple services all under the same business type bucket.

In both cases there are very much local ties in queries and also in what google displays in the SERPs. Hope that helps, let me know if you need more info and I'll provide what I can.

Obviously, feel free to share only what you?re comfortable with sharing

My thinking is you?d want a page structure along the lines of

www.examplemainsite.com/city1/service1
www.examplemainsite.com/city1/service2
www.examplemainsite.com/city1/service3
www.examplemainsite.com/city2/service1

etc...

And, of course, be a hard-ass about making each location and service page unique.

Probably needless to say, I?d also use the location-specific URLs as your Google+Local landing pages (e.g. www.examplemainsite.com/city1).