Google+ Local Website URL - Individual location landing pages

[Andrew Forster]

Hey Gang,

I posted a comment on another thread about this, however I think this merits it's own post.

Let's say in a perfect world, you started with Google Places, and made a terrific transition into Google Plus Local. You have a contact landing page for each city you're targeting, and you're using rich markup for the address, and the only place to find the city appropriate NAP is on it's respective contact page.

If you have a claimed/merged Google+ Local business page for each location, should you link to the index page of the site, or the respective/corresponding contact page of the appropriate city?

Does anyone know what the best practice is for something like this?

 

[Andrew Sawyer]

Hey Gang,

I posted a comment on another thread about this, however I think this merits it's own post.

Let's say in a perfect world, you started with Google Places, and made a terrific transition into Google Plus Local. You have a contact landing page for each city you're targeting, and you're using rich markup for the address, and the only place to find the city appropriate NAP is on it's respective contact page.

If you have a claimed/merged Google+ Local business page for each location, should you link to the index page of the site, or the respective/corresponding contact page of the appropriate city?

Does anyone know what the best practice is for something like this?

Using the specific urls for the corresponding local locations is the preferred method as it cuts down on duplicate issues with bots and movides more specific information about that location first. Anyone can click back to the site but having that location's info is what Google wants. I'd like to be able to check the site to see that the hours, phone, etc match what's in the G+L listing.

 

[Linda Buquet]

True.

Keep in mind however than the majority of ranking juice comes from the page that the G+ L is linked to. So if that location page is just like a contact us page with NAP and map it's not going to rank.

So I'd make the location page sort of like a combo home page and contact us. NAP and location details on top. SEO'd for that city + KWs. Some good descriptive content AND a map embedded properly. (Not the way most businesses do it.)

Also keep in mind all the location pages need UNIQUE content. Can't just copy paste the guts and change the location details.

Can't remember who it is off hand that I've seen that does a pretty good job with their location pages and usually ranks high. Maybe it's Roto-Rooter but not sure.

 

[Andrew Forster]

Thanks for the response guys, much appreciated

 

[bradleymarones]

To clarify a bit, then it's not a good idea to have a schema markup of multiple addresses, site wide in the site's footer, but instead to have a location's NAP marked-up solely on that location-specific landing page, correct?

For example, 1 website for a business with 2 locations - Miami and Orlando. Instead of displaying marked-up schema address of both locations in the website's footer, which would display site-wide, only list the Miami NAP (marked-up) on the Miami landing page and Orlando NAP on the Orlando landing page. So, it's not a good idea to have both addresses show up site-wide.

Someone please correct me. Thanks in advance!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Bradley,

Sorta with a twist on what you said.

The home page is the easiest to rank usually and gets the most natural links so need a location to stick on that page. You ideally want to NAP home with either the home office or primary location or maybe biggest city that's most competitive and hardest to rank in.

Then on home make it clear to clients, we have multiple locations to serve you. Click here for city 2, city 3 etc. Or have a locations page but don't have mixed NAP on that page. Just list each city with links from there to each location page.

Obviously above is very generic advice and each situation is unique and partly dependent on how many locations we are dealing with.

We have a bunch of helpful posts on the topic at this hashtag I created to attempt to organize all the multi-location topics. #multi-location - Search Results

 

[bradleymarones]

Thanks for your response Linda, much appreciated. I wonder if Google sees a difference between a marked-up schema NAP and just regular text NAP.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Yes schema is best.