Many businesses operate in large geographic areas, from across entire cities and regions. In particular, this can be the case with trades based businesses such as electricians and plumbers, who generate most of their leads online by geographic based searches such as [service + location]. In these cases, it can be beneficial to run a multiple location SEO strategy to maximise the lead potential.

What is a multiple location SEO strategy?

ML SEO is a focus on building an organic keyword strategy which can have your business capture high volume keywords across multiple geographic areas, maximising the lead generation potential. There’s multiple layers to this – but the primary focus is on building a website structure which can have multiple locations listed on individual pages. There are a number of considerations for this however, as you can also damage your websites rankings if you do not execute the strategy correctly.

Location Pages

We’ve all seen this – businesses having 100’s of location pages spouting the same information saying they help the local area with their service offering. Generally these are not unique, spammy and repetitive with their content. Unsurprisingly, these pages generally fail to gain traction of any decent level.

But there’s a way to do this successfully via a specific formula. Here’s the main tips for building location pages which rank well on Google:

  • Limit your market. At a maximum, you should stick to 100 locations with a single domain, preferably less wherever possible. To narrow your selection, order the locations by search volume or population size if you cannot find search data. By limiting your locations you will help the next steps with creating unique pages
  • Create unique pages. By using page builder plugins which can automatically generally all of your location pages and content, you can efficiently build unique content. If you use a page builder like WP Zinc’s page builder plugin, you can use spintax code to create content which can be rewritten in dozens of different ways with a minimum time input. By limiting your suburb locations, these spintax rewrites will then have the lowest level of duplication of content and make the pages more Google-friendly.
  • Build content-rich pages. Each page should ideally be 500+ words, with unique images and well-structured to include titles, headings and subheadings. Using the same page builders as above, you can ensure you have a variety of different images and heading versions to create unique local listings
  • Build a Directory Page. By having a service or location specific page – you can set out clearly the areas you operate in and links to each of these pages. Avoid dumping large amounts of suburb locations at the bottom of your service and home pages as this just appears spammy and takes away from the user experience.

If you can dominate this space it can rapidly increase your websites lead generation potential. ClickBurst SEO uses this strategy with their client’s websites with strong results.

GMB Optimisation

Second to your business website, optimising your Google My Business Listing can increase lead generation from increased website visits and direct calls.

Compared to organic SEO for your website, GMB is a little more straight forward. The top three things to focus on are:

  • Ensure you fill out as much as you can. Contact details, address, website, appointment link, description, images and products available. Every section helps Google understand more about your business and put you ahead of less comprehensively completed GMB’s of your competitors
  • Quality, well-written reviews. There is a general trend of greater volumes and consistent frequency of reviews. Ensure these are genuine, natural reviews as manipulating your reviews can lead to GMB suspension or penalty. Encourage customers to review your business by putting a link in your email footer.
  • Link your Google Maps pin to your website. There’s a significant correlation between links from your GMB’s map link and increased ranking – and there is an increased benefit from the user experience in having an active map showing your location on your website. Use Google’s share function to generate a custom sized map code block which can be input on your website easily.

If you can get on top of these core focuses, you will increase your rankings which will lead to increased website visits and call-throughs.