How Do Multi-Location Businesses Dominate Local Search?

Do you have a thriving local business around your area? Trying to create a more extensive service area is hard. The answer to it is to have different locations for your business.

86% of people look for companies on Google Maps. Local SEO is the name of the game for brick and mortar businesses.

If you are trying to optimize for location and get more of your audience, learning search engine optimization is critical.

What if we tell you there’s a way to boost multi location businesses? That’s right, we can help you in your quest to a better local search.

Today, you can’t ignore what local optimization offers to your business. This article can help you learn how to dominate local searches and give you the edge.

Setting Your Local SEO Goals

The first thing we need to do is set local SEO goals for our different locations. Some may feel the temptation to create one domain per location, but that’s wasteful. It’s better to merge all the link juice to a single website.

The only difference will be a choice between subdomains vs sub-directories. There is no real advantage in local SEO for both. This depends on your entire preference on how to do things.

If you’re a small business, however, it’s inexpensive to use subdirectories. It is available into the system, and does not need the more expensive CMS types out there.

Optimize Location Pages To Dominate Searches

What many companies seem to forget is to dominate local search, they need to create location pages for every branch that they have. A single landing page for all your locales will not help your SEO at all.

Every page should optimize location for every one of your branches. Even then, it’s vital not to do a copy-paste job of the details. Work out the contents of your location pages, which may include:

Business Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP)
Google Maps Embed
Pertinent directions of the locale
Local landmarks for Google
Unique, location-specific branch information
Full customer reviews and comments
Location-specific meta information
Branch news and staff information

The idea is to make the most out of your local SEO. To do so, you need to treat your city landing pages like subdomains. They need to have their own hierarchy within them.

Optimize location with local business schema markup. Use your meta tags, meta description and everything under the hood for local SEO. Segregate each locations’ reviews, testimonials, content, news, and promos.

Submit an updated sitemaps information to Google to allow it to crawl the pages. This not only improves your locale’s visibility. It can create an improved relevance with all the location relevant data.

Using Google My Business

The next thing that you would need to work on to dominate your local search is to create directory entries. It’s no use creating entries in directories with a small audience pool. The best place to start is nowhere else than Google My Business.

Google My Business is not only free. It is also the biggest directory owned by the largest search engine in the world.

It also is the most used navigation and maps app in the world. It trumps its nearest competition six-fold.

The next option you have is Yelp. It is the most popular business review app. It popularized the 5-star rating system, commanding respect from many audiences.

Some other options you have should be Apple Maps. It gives you a position within the iOS-exclusive users. Another is Bing Places and Facebook, now providing location-specific information for businesses.

To complete your local search, you would want directories. These include sites such as Angie’s List, Manta and Yellow Pages.

If you are within a specific industry, there’s an extra step. You may want to find directories recommended for your verticals as well.

Making the Best of Your GMB Data

To make the most out of your Google My Business information, there are a few things that you can do. For one, make sure to create service areas for each of your business. These service areas are there to create a “border” of sorts to your range.

This also creates the chance for a Google 3-pack position, which is a valuable Google feature. 3-Packs sends your GMB position up to the front page on the top, superseding the number 1 organic ranking. This means once you’re in the top 3 to 5, the battle for the crown should be less hectic.

There are a few ways to stay competitive on the 3-Pack, and most of it is keeping relevant information. Google likes relevant information, so feeding it good, solid and verifiable content can help optimizing location pages.

To further optimize, you would want the NAP in your city landing pages to be like the ones on Google. Exact details are crucial.

Your category should also be consistent across all city landing pages. If you register yourself as fast food, the entire multi-location network should have the same categorization.

Optimize location with insights. Find what are the queries about your business and perform keyword research. Local SEO is all about having your places more accessible on the internet.

Handling Other Business Citations

Handling your business citations are a classic headache. This is true for anyone involved in local SEO. This involves managing your “classified ads” on every online business directory.

As we noted, it’s crucial to not squander your time and money with the low impact business directories. If you have any tools like Moz or SEMRush, a quick rule of thumb is to not deal with low to mid-ranking sites. This means you want to position your directory entry in websites with the top 50 directories.

If you don’t have the luxury of SEO tools, there’s another way. You can browse lists and recommendations for local citation sites online.

The thing is, it’s essential for you to correct any mistakes on your NAP online. Google scans online pages that contain your NAP. Any inconsistencies that are visible on your listing hurts your local SEO rankings.

You would need to check aggregators available online. You can even use management tools for it as needed.

NAP consistency is among the most important ranking factors for local search. This includes areas such as citation volume among others.

Creating Local Search Relevant Content

When you optimize location, one of the hallmarks of good local SEO is content. It’s vital to write unique content that takes advantages of the local keyword strings. Content is still king, after all.

Make articles and content that are relevant to your target market. Optimize for keywords within your population segment and your verticals as well. Writing for the audience rather than local SEO in mind is useful.

You would want to keep up with fresh content as well. You would want to have testimonials and reviews added to each location. Google loves this.

New, updated content is one of the 200 ranking factors in Google, so having as many in the bag is a good move.

Building Your Backlinks

A smart move to do is talk with local pages within your area and build backlinks. It may be a guest post or something as small as a feature on the local paper. It will help much with your endeavors.

On-page local SEO is useful. At the end of the day, however, backlinks are still among the most potent factors when trying to optimize for local search.

Talk to local businesses who are willing to exchange backlinks with you. You can do it through guest posts. Consider talking to your suppliers and create a relevant supply chain SEO.

Tourist pages, local chambers of commerce and government pages bring strong link juice. Many experts still swear by the power of .edu and .gov sites, together with local affiliations.

There’s much to contend with this information, but having a connection to public domains with big memberships and good reputation can help.

Investing in SEO Tools and Services

It’s good to invest in tools or services that can help you with local SEO. The thing is, performing digital marketing work yourself will take money and time off more crucial things.

Tools like Moz Local and SEMRush can help you manage tons of data more accessible. It removes extreme repetition in work, which can make the job less appetizing.

Services are also crucial if you don’t have your own digital marketing team. If you insist on doing it on your own, tools are the least expensive route you may want to take.

Creating Dominant SEO in Your Multi Location Businesses

Local search is all about knowing how to take care of your visibility online. There are a few different ways to do local SEO, so knowing them can help you dominate your area visibility.

If you are not sure how to go further with your SEO for your multi location businesses, you need help. This is where Digital Neighbor can lend a hand.

Digital Neighbor is a group of results-oriented digital marketing people who want to make your business succeed. Our Tampa, FL digital agency brings expertise in local SEO, PPC, analytics and more.

Let us give your business the housewarming it deserves with our expert analysis. Contact Digital Neighbor and get the right solutions right in your neighborhood.

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Here’s Why You Should Be Tracking Your Marketing Efforts

Do you know how profitable your marketing is? Can you name your highest ROI channels? Do you know which campaigns are driving traffic and conversions?

Measuring your marketing is crucial for allocating your budget in a way that helps you achieve your business goals. If you’re hoping to scale and grow this year, you need to ensure all of your efforts work in tandem toward that goal.

A 2015 study by the Forbes Insights Report shows that only 22% of marketers have data-driven initiatives achieving significant results. To be frank, that’s not enough. All marketers should show the value of their work so their clients can see the impact of their marketing budgets.

Read on to learn more about how to test and evaluate your business’ marketing strategy so you can get the results you want.

The Value of Measuring Your Marketing Efforts

Failing to measure your marketing efforts means you’re spending money without ensuring a payoff. Yet, many businesses do this time and again because they don’t know that they can measure the effectiveness of their digital marketing strategies. A disturbing survey conducted by ITSMA and Vision Edge shows that 74% of marketers cannot correctly measure or report the impact of their efforts on their clients’ businesses.

By tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, you’ll know how the money you’ve allocated has been used and be able to shift funds into more profitable channels. You’ll see where traffic and sales spikes are coming from and be able to note what’s working—and what isn’t.

Tracking also allows you to run tests so you can better optimize your campaigns. Since you are tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns, you can measure the effect of different headlines, copy, landing pages, images, and more to see which ones generate the most clicks, conversions, or purchases. Then, you can roll out those high-ROI campaigns across the board. This truly allows you to improve over time and consistently create high-ROI initiatives.

How Can You Track Your Marketing Efforts?

If you’re using a comprehensive digital strategy to reach prospective customers, you may need to track your efforts with multiple tools or platforms. This can be a bit unwieldy, but it’s worth the effort. We consolidate all of this information into an easy-to-read dashboard and quarterly reports for our clients so they can get all of their data in one place.

To get started tracking your digital marketing efforts, you should get Google Analytics set up and installed correctly across your site. Google Analytics allows you to see how many people are visiting your website, where they’re coming from, which pages they’re looking at, how long they are staying on your site, and more. It can help you measure the effectiveness of your SEO, PPC ads, content strategy, and more. With Google Analytics, you can see which pages are the most popular, which are generating the most clicks, and which pages aren’t performing. We often think of tracking as measuring what works, but measuring what doesn’t work is just as important. Finding these opportunities for improvement allows us to better optimize webpages and campaigns so they can become lead-generators as well.

You can use a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs to track which keywords you’re ranking for and your Google ranking over time. This is especially useful if you’re trying to rank higher for specific keywords or focus on particular pages.

If you’re using email or social media marketing, you should integrate UTM codes in your newsletters and posts to track traffic. Some email platforms and social media schedulers do this for you automatically. If yours don’t, you can use the Google URL Campaign Builder. A UTM allows you to append tracking information to the end of a URL so that you can determine where someone is coming from.

You can also use a tool like bit.ly—a link shortener that logs the click rate and analytics for each truncated link created—to track the effectiveness of social media links and other campaigns. You will need to create a separate link for every channel to do this properly, even if the landing page is the same. So even if you are doing a 20% off offer across the board and sending customers to a particular page, you need to do separate links for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Otherwise, you won’t be able to see your results by channel.

Marketing Analytics to Track

The value of marketing attribution is clear—so what exactly should you be tracking?

Metrics will differ based on your digital marketing plan. However, the following are some of the most important metrics to measure.

PPC:

CPC (Cost Per Click)
CPI (Cost Per Impression)
Cost Per Conversion
Click-Thru Rate
Paid Traffic
Impressions

SEO:

Keywords
Organic Traffic
New Visitors
Pageviews
Traffic per page
Traffic per location
Conversion Rate
Click-Thru Rate
Time on Page
Bounce Rate
Pages Indexed
Referring Domains (Backlinks)

Emails:

Email Opens
Email Clicks
Email Subscribes
Email Unsubscribe
Bounce Rate
List Growth Rate

Social Media:

Followers
Top Fans
Growth Rate
Reach
Likes
Comments
Shares
Mentions
Click-thrus
Views
Response Rate

You will want to track these results over time. While results for a single time frame—a snapshot—can give you some helpful information in the moment, long-term tracking can provide you with more in-depth results and the ability to track trends. Because some digital marketing tactics take time to pay off, like SEO, tracking your results over time will give you better insight into whether your efforts are helping you reach your goals or whether they’ve stalled out and need to be reworked.

Social Media Insights

Social Media analytics can help you determine who your audience is and what they want to see from you. Using tools to track your social media engagement can help recognize trends that shape strategy.

The Facebook Pixel can be very helpful for learning more about your customers. The Facebook Pixel is a simple line of code that can be embedded in your website. This tool will provide you with information about any Facebook user logged in and who visits your website.

While this information isn’t specific enough to reveal personal information, it will provide you with other valuable insights like what they do on your website and what items they place in their shopping care. The Pixel also allows you to retarget users who have previously visited your website.

Compare Targeted Demographics

Don’t just take your metrics at face value. To get the most from your data, parse it to identify trends within the data.

For example, social media marketing has given businesses the unique opportunity to refine the audience that sees their campaign. While different platforms have different privacy standards, most allow you to control which demographics will see your ad. You can run a campaign for millennial females or male boomers.

This is especially helpful in comparing the results of your marketing efforts. To quantify the overall success of each campaign, look at its success with each demographic.

Let’s imagine you’re running the numbers on a recent moderately successful campaign that prominently featured the image of a kitten.

While the campaign may have been considered moderately effective on the whole, upon closer examination, you learn it didn’t have much luck with men 34+. However, the campaign was counterbalanced by an incredibly high click-through rate with young women. This helps you see that it would’ve been more effective if you had targeted your campaign better. Now you can reuse the graphic for marketing campaigns specifically targeted at young women.

You can compare targeted demographics for PPC as well.

Identifying What Works

Let’s say your business experienced an immense boost in web traffic. This change occurred after the launch of your newly redesigned website.

At first glance, this might seem normal. However, after careful review, you realize that the data shows a huge jump in a single day. Further research could suggest that your numbers resulted from a social media mention from an influencer.

It could also indicate that the spike was a result of fake traffic. By identifying this, you’ll be able to filter the traffic for a more accurate view. You’ll be able to identify the motivation behind the increase in page views and what the click-through rates of your campaigns indicate.

Results of tracking your marketing efforts provide a good business perspective. Using analytics allows insight into your status quo and aids in creating realistic expectations and goals. Make sure to look at the whole picture, then take a deep dive into the different components to increase your understanding of your campaigns and how well they are working.

Find the Perfect Partner for Your Online Marketing Needs

Maximize your marketing budget by working with a data-driven team. There’s no reason to train yourself in Google Analytics, PPC, and more when your time is better spent growing your business. At Digital Neighbor, we’ll support you by creating a marketing blueprint that is both testable and scalable, so we can measure all of our efforts and show you exactly what is happening. When you’re ready to invest more in your marketing, we can funnel funds into your most profitable channels so you can draw more interested leads to your website.

Want to learn more? Let’s chat!

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Whether you have a simple SEO question or want to have a deep conversation about your digital strategy, we’re all ears. Contact us today for a chat or to learn how we can put our digital marketing expertise to good use for your business.