3 Unmissable Tips for Brands with Multiple Locations | Vicinus.ai
Local search is a necessary focus with any business that has a physical store. This focus should extend to all of the stores in your company, especially those with multiple locations. Many industry experts are becoming increasingly aware of these important search ranking signals.
Local search in many ways works to level the playing fields of larger brands which may have the resources in order to pay for advertising etc.
This means that, whether you have a large or smaller business, making sure that your local search is optimised for multiple locations is crucial. This is in order to maintain a strong local presence and build up the visibility of your brand locally.
There are three main ways that you can optimise your brand with multiple local stores.
Making Sure Your Brand has Consistent NAP
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number, although the term NAP+W is more accurate (name, address, phone number, and website).
Having consistent information across all of your business listings is essential to provide the customer with accurate and updated information. Also, consistent NAP information provides the search engine with data too.
As search engines rely on the data you provide them with in order to verify and legitimise the business, your NA information should be consistent. This is because it is more likely for the search engine to show your business when a customer searches for a term relevant to it.
This means that the more consistent the information you present across all of your business listings, the more likely it is that your business will outrank its competitors in relevant searches.
Our hyperlocal marketing platform can help you manage business listings from a central platform. This is because Vicinus features real-time management of all your locations from one easy-to-use platform. This can help customers find only up-to-date and consistent information about your brand.
Create Multiple Unique Business Listings for Multiple Locations in Local Search
Directory listings are and have always been, very effective tools for local SEO. These types of listings are especially relevant to Google and Bing which integrate their business listings with search results.
However, if you have multiple locations for your business, it is essential that you have individually-created business listings for each location.
This is because not only does this aid the customer journey and experience but Google Places quality guidelines suggest creating one unique listing per location.
Utilising Paid Search Marketing to Your Advantage for Multiple Locations
Organic traffic is a brilliant way of gaining more customers for your business. Some of these techniques are citation building, directory listings, and geo-targeted content. However, paid search can dramatically increate your organic efforts too.
Google even suggests that:
These are searches such as ‘coffee shop near me’.
Honing in on searches like these with paid advertising is a fantastic tool to use alongside your organic search with the results being almost immediate.
With paid search, you pay for each and every click to your website through your paid search result. This means that your ROI (return on investment) depends on how much of that traffic converts into real customers for you.
