Local SEO can be tricky for businesses with multiple locations. Knowing how to get each location to rank on local searches can drive a lot of traffic to your business and give a boost to your overall SEO efforts.
There are two basic steps to this process, listing each location separately in directories and creating individual pages for each location on your website.
In each case, making sure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) info is correct is crucial to local SEO rankings.
We’ve put together some best practices to get the most from your business’s directory listings and location pages.
Local SEO Directory Listings
In order for each of your business’s locations to show up in local search engine results, they’re going to need to be listed individually.
When someone searches for a business in a specific location or for a nearby business, search engines use NAP info provided by directory listings to supply this information.
If one of your locations is at or near the area but doesn’t have its own listing, it won’t show up in a search. To avoid this, list each location separately.
Here’s a list of the top 100 directories. We recommend you concentrate on the top 50 directories - that should be enough for search engines to draw good data.
NAP Info
For each location’s listings, the NAP info will need to be identical to avoid confusing your customers and search engines. Here are a few guidelines to follow when listing these businesses:
1. Make sure that the business name is exactly the same in each listing. If the name is even slightly different, search engines will assume that each version is an independent business and any SEO juice will be lost.