Most people assume that the larger the brand, the better the rankings on Google.
However, that is not always the case, particularly for non-branded searches and keywords (those that do not reference a business name or brand).
Since each geographical market (city or suburb) may cater to a different demographic, it can also be difficult to streamline your marketing campaigns, especially when you’re working with a large number of locations.
Basically, ranking for multiple locations on Google can get tricky… fast. And if you do a poor job of it, can often result in ranking for no locations.
First, a Few Reasons Why Local SEO Matters:
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Google (and other search engines) factor in location data when displaying search results.
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People tend to include cities/states/regions when searching for businesses on the web.
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Consumers are starting to trust smaller, local businesses over larger, well-known brands
The most common question, one website or multiple…
Managing multiple different websites for one business can be extremely time-consuming. As an SEO, my biggest gripe with using multiple domains is that each is indexed separately so the efforts aren’t compounded.
Instead of having one client, company or location to focus on, you have 50+.
And if you want to make fully functioning sites and want them all to rank well, then you will need to create 50 different versions of your “About” page, 50 different versions of your “Services” page, and so on.
Therefore the better way to do it is to have specific pages on ONEwebsite which target the service and location.
As an example:
heychiro.co/seo/brisbane
heychiro.co/seo/sydney
In this example you have the service page /SEO/ and then underneath it you have location pages. There is one page targeting Brisbane and one page targeting Sydney.
And yes, it is important to put the service before the location in the url. e.g. SEO (the service) appears before the locations (Sydney & Brisbane).
In my experience this is by far the best way to target multiple locations. It also allows for future growth as you look to grow your business into other services and locations.
It’s virtually impossible to rank well for each one of your target markets, unless you create content that is optimised specifically for each location.
According to Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts, individualised pages/urls are the way to go. According to Cutts, each location should get its own unique URL and each page and their respective URL should be included in your sitemap to help Google and other search engines index the content.
Being able to target multiple locations and services can be tremendously powerful to the growth of your business.
Imagine being able to expand your lead generation into another city before you even setup your physical presence there. It can significantly reduce your risk when expanding geographically.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Jason
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