Client with Multiple Locations - Organic and Local SEO strategy?

[Tim Colling]

My turn to ask this question
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I'd appreciate getting your input about this situation. Which strategy would you recommend? Are there any special tools that you think would especially be helpful, such as local seo plugins, etc?

Client has five offices, real, legitimate offices with staff, in five different cities throughout Southern California. One of them can be considered to be the ?headquarters? because that?s where the company officers are located.

We need to rank well for each office in its own city, in other words, both organic and local SEO matter in this case.

The company has never done any truly effective SEO work, neither organic nor local.

We don?t want to build out five different, mostly identical websites so we need to optimize for one site with ability to rank in local results as well as organic in all five locations.

The strategies to choose from include:

A. Optimize for local SEO for the HQ location with bot-readable HQ NAP info on virtually all pages on the site, except for four pages that would be landing pages for the other locations, with bot-readable NAP info on each of those landing pages for its corresponding office NAP info. These landing pages (plus one for the HQ location) would be optimized with local-specific info about that office?s personnel, videos, images, etc. as well as information about relevant local resources, hopefully linking to those resources and securing links back from those resources. Except for the office landing pages, the NAP info for the non-HQ locations would be shown as non-bot-readable images, perhaps with hyperlinks to call those locations when clicked upon.

B. Do what is included in option A AND also create standalone, NAP-optimized landing pages for each of the non-HQ locations with unique domain names based on some sort of exact-match-domain name like companyName-locationCity-dot-com or something like that, with links from those stand-alone landing pages to the main website. In this strategy we?d do our best to make the landing pages look as if they were actually pages on the main site. We?d have to consider whether or not the content on the stand-alone pages would have to be sufficiently different from the landing pages on the main site to avoid losing SEO benefit due to duplicate content issues.

C. Other ideas?

Thank you!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Client has five offices, real, legitimate offices with staff, in five different cities throughout Southern California. One of them can be considered to be the “headquarters” because that’s where the company officers are located.

A. Optimize for local SEO for the HQ location with bot-readable HQ NAP info on virtually all pages on the site, except for four pages that would be landing pages for the other locations, with bot-readable NAP info on each of those landing pages for its corresponding office NAP info. These landing pages (plus one for the HQ location) would be optimized with local-specific info about that office’s personnel, videos, images, etc. as well as information about relevant local resources, hopefully linking to those resources and securing links back from those resources. Except for the office landing pages, the NAP info for the non-HQ locations would be shown as non-bot-readable images, perhaps with hyperlinks to call those locations when clicked upon.

Hi Tim,

For #2 when you say standalone landing pages, it sounds like you're talking separate sites? If so, no I wouldn't do that keep everything on one site with different location landing pages.

"the NAP info for the non-HQ locations would be shown as non-bot-readable images"

Don't know where you're thinking about having all of these NAPs, but I think having full NAPs for all 5 locations in footer or even a contact us page is not even needed.

What I recommend is having HQ nap on home page and even in the footer of every page except for the location pages. But then it instead of full NAP in footer or wherever either link to a locations page that branches with just a link to each page or say we have four other locations to serve you… Then link to city 1, city 2. etc. Then on each city page or additional city + KW pages have only NAP for that location.

Please see my detailed answer in post #5 here: <a href="http://www.localsearchforum.com/multi-location-issues/17582-business-w-multiple-locations-should-g-listings-link-home-page-loc-pages.html">Business w/Multiple Locations: Should G+ Listings Link To Home Page or Loc. Pages?</a>

 

[Jacksonville SEO]

Came here to echo Linda's advice...spot on.

 

[Tim Colling]

New question regarding this project:

Regarding Google+ page(s) and Google My Business Locations

Do I create one of each for every one of the five locations?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Tim, yes you would create a separate G+ Local (GMB) page for each physical location.

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[Tim Colling]

Will doing so also create "locations" for each? And G+ pages for each? At one time those were two separate things



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[Colan Nielsen]

Yes. There are only two types of G+ Pages. Local and Brand. As long as you create a Local G+ page you are creating a location that is connected to Google Maps.

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[Linda Buquet]

Will doing so also create "locations" for each? And G+ pages for each? At one time those were two separate things

Colan is right. All you ever want to do for a local page is create it in GMB as local. It will almost instantly create a G+ page too and everything is merged into one Local page. It's been over a year or so since we had the separate page thing to deal with.

 

[Tim Colling]

Thanks again, Colan and Linda. It's been a little while since I did a project where the client had literally no G+ page presence and no Google maps presence. This client has five locations, and two had no GMB presence at all.

Thanks!