Do you have a business and multiple addresses for it? A best practice for having more than one physical location represented on your business website is to create a dedicated landing page for each of your locations.
The more a client has to dig through your site, the more likely they will leave before giving you a call. So make it easy with landing pages!
It will enhance your whole site’s relevancy in online searches, for your vertical, in the geographic area.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is any page on a website. One of them should include the who, what, where, when and why of one of your physical locations.
Example
Let’s make up an imaginary client and call their business Bob’s Hovercar & Rocketboots Warehouse.
How I wish this was real
Let’s pretend Bob is located in Buffalo, NY and has 3 warehouses. One in North Tonawanda, one in Amherst, and one in Cheektowaga.
On each landing page we’d want to include their:
- address
- phone number
- hours of operation
- picture of the location
- link for directions
- at least a paragraph of unique copy to describe the location, area of service, and any interesting facts about the location
Because the content on this landing page is unique and focused on a single location, it will send a very strong signal to Google saying that in this particular town there is a Hovercar & Rocketboots warehouse. This is what will enhance your whole site’s relevancy in searches done for your vertical in that area.
Creating landing pages also has the additional benefit of being perfect for SEM or Search Engine Marketing (that is, buying ads in Google or other search engines to target people searching for your vertical in a certain area). With your ads, if they are searching in a specific area where you have a location, when they click on your ad you can send them directly to your landing page. Immediately presenting the potential client with the relevant information makes a conversion much more likely.
If you are a business owner with multiple physical locations, building a website that accurately represents your franchise isn’t always as straightforward as the method explained above above.
I’ve worked with many clients who have the locations page list all of their locations. This is a simple solution, but not very suited for ranking well in each geographic area. That’s because the amount of keywords and locations a single page can be relevant to, is limited (in the eyes of search engines).
Some websites even list all of the locations they want to service on the titles, descriptions, and copy of each page. This is usually fine, but again there is a limit. Below is a picture of a footer from one of our (unnamed) clients.
After two or three locations are mentioned on a page, you begin to get diminishing returns for where Google thinks your content is relevant.
The website from the image directly above did not magically rank all of those locations just because they‘re listed on each page.
Sometimes the same business has a different website for each one of it’s location.
This is usually fairly effective, but the cost of building and maintaining multiple websites is prohibitive for most businesses. Having multiple domain names will also fragment PageRank, making it harder to target a larger geographic market. [If that last sentence is gibberish to you, you should check out our [article on PageRank!]
