What to do if you have multiple business locations?
There's a great article by Miriam Ellis on creating and optimizing landing pages for local search if you have several locations.
For each location you must have:
1. A unique, non-shared local area code phone number 2. A unique, non-shared physical street address
But that doesn't work for everyone:
Yet, I’ve encountered many websites on which five or ten or twenty near-identical pages have been created in an attempt to target customers beyond city borders...To me, the creation of city landing pages in this brick-and-mortar situation seems like nothing more than an awkward attempt to grab at rankings. And, as there can be definite negative effects from creating duplicate or near-duplicate content...
There are a few great additional discussions on the related topic:
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Hey Ann, maybe I am being daft but is there a link to the Miriam Ellis article?
There are two sides to this
1. The lets just spam local in an effort to pick up more visibility for our business area in surrounding cities.
2. We actually have different offices with different numbers and staff and specialities and we should ensure that search users land on the right page with the right information.
I am doing some work with a Bank in the UK and whilst they are highly visible, finding the right page on the site(s) in search is a nightmare. As is finding contact details.
I explored several search terms and it could take a few searches, then three pages to find a contact number that ultimately puts you into a generic automated phone system that requires five menu options to get through to someone who can't help you - not cool.
This is the business side of things so they are looking for new customers and existing customers and whilst they have branches in most local cities with direct lines they are creating a fairly awful experience for existing and prospective customers that could be easily remedied.
It's the same old story - if there is a legitimate reason for doing this then localised search for different locations makes great sense from a visibility and customer experience perspective. If you have one office and some virtual phone numbers and are just trying to do a local land grab then you are wasting your (and your customers) time.