When building your business, whether you have a physical store or e-commerce, setting up a website is one of the most vital aspects of establishing an online presence. After all, this is a digital-based world, where if someone wants something, they look it up online.
However, optimizing the website for all your spots can be rather challenging when your business has multiple locations or delivers to more than one area.
That’s why, today, we’ll help you understand multi-location websites, their importance, the best strategies for them, and what you’ll need to avoid.
Ready to take your website to another level—or many levels? Let’s begin!
Table of Contents
Multi-Location Websites: A Quick Overview
Firstly, multi-location websites aren’t just regular websites with various locations and business listings inserted on your website.
Put simply, a multi-location website is a website designed with businesses that operate in more than one location in mind.
They’re the best kind of website for businesses such as retail chains or any big franchise or brand that serves customers in diverse geographic areas for local search on Google search.
What makes multiple-location SEO so vital is its ability to provide location-specific information and directories (local SEO) under a unified brand umbrella. This makes it relatively easy for your clients or local customers and searchers to figure out the nearest store, events, special offers, and more than just the location.
One of the main differences between a multi-location website and a single location is the complex navigation and structure of the site.
While single-location websites can focus on general information, a multi-location one must accommodate individual pages with quality content for each location.
Moreover, there’s the nuisance of ensuring proper usage of multi-location SEO, with each page containing relevant content to the specific area it serves. This can include local promotions, events, and specific services to attract potential customers.
How to Optimize Your Website for Multiple Locations
Now that you understand the importance of having a multi-location website, it’s time to learn how to create and maintain one. This process requires a few essential steps, including the following ones:
1. Building the Right Structure
If you’re a business owner, whether an international or local business, one of the first things your client looks for in a site is the location of your service. In other words, as long as your business offers services—virtual or otherwise—in more than one area, you must create multiple location pages or landing pages.
These individual pages should contain a specific citation or NAP (business name, address, and phone number) information about each business location or service area, like address for a physical location, contact information, hours of operation, service offers, and even unique store features.
Moreover, the design flavor should echo the unique characteristics of each location. For example, use local images, feature staff profiles to add a personal touch, and incorporate design elements intertwined with the local culture or architecture.
2. Using Proper SEO Strategies
When optimizing a multi-location website, your first step should be researching and identifying the right keywords.
This doesn’t mean just the keywords related to your industry but the ones connected to each location. So, each location page should include the city or region name, local landmarks, and locally used terms.
Certain tools can help you identify and organize the local keywords, including Google Keyword Planner and the local surveys. Once you have the keywords, spread them throughout parts of the webpage, including the title tags, meta description, and the page’s content.
It’s important not to overuse the keywords to the point where it’s considered keyword stuffing. Rather, distribute them naturally and in context to make the customer’s experience smooth.
3. Organizing the Content for Each Location
You must create high-quality content that targets the right audience to ensure your search engine optimization plans work.
For some, this means well-researched blog posts, constant updates, and many events. However, this is a limited view of quality content and mainly works best for individual locations.
For multi-location businesses, you should categorize each area and understand your target audience’s preferences and culture. You can do this by researching and analyzing customer feedback to create content that reflects local traditions and events, attracting customers!
4. Enhancing User Experience
A great user experience isn’t just about ensuring you don’t have duplicate content or a fast load time. It’s about making sure that the potential clients you get from search traffic don’t click back!
How so, you might wonder? Well, besides ensuring the easy flow of the website, you also need to implement location finder tools like store locators or interactive maps, similar to Google Maps, to make it easier for customers to find you.
Also, you can use interactive store locators where the user can enter the zip code and city or even use GPS to find the nearest establishment.
5. Reviewing and Updating
When you have everything set up perfectly, it can feel like you’ve finally finished building your website.
Unfortunately, with SEO and constant online trends, there’s always something new to be done! As a result, you’ll need to employ tools like Google Analytics to track user interactions on each location page.
When you monitor factors such as page views, bounce rate, and conversion rate, you’ll be able to update each page as necessary.
Of course, don’t forget to categorize your analytics data by location to understand the geographical elements affecting each page.
Google Business Profile is another tool that can help with both analytics and enhancing your credibility. A profile for each page can provide you with various data that can take the analysis to another level, allowing you to test different elements and optimize your website.
What to Avoid When Creating Multi-Location Websites
There are many mistakes that business owners fall for when creating multi-location websites, such as:
1. Using More Than One Domain
Just because you’re offering services in many locations doesn’t mean you should use more than one domain.
In fact, when you do that, you negatively influence your SEO, as the search engines may not recognize the many domains as part of a single brand. This can weaken the overall domain authority.
You can also confuse the customers and affect the brand’s identity.
2. Not Adding Enough Content
As mentioned, for a multi-location business to thrive, you need to add enough high-quality content, often full of local keywords, to boost your SEO rankings.
When you don’t add enough content, you miss out on engaging the local audience, which means fewer sales and fewer data to analyze later.
3. Inconsistency
Finally, when you’re trying to connect with the local audience via design patterns or imagery, don’t forget your brand’s fundamental image. Inconsistency in branding across different location pages can confuse customers, affect their trust, and weaken brand recognition.
To Sum Up
Multi-location websites are platforms that help brands and franchises reach their target audience around the globe without having to use separate domains for each location.
However, these websites also require more work, as their structure and SEO aren’t like single-location stores.
They need localized content, targeted keywords, different internal links, and much more to stand out in the search rankings.
FAQ
How to appear in multiple city searches with one website?
