Get Your Multi-Location Business Ranking in Multiple Cities With One Domain

In 2010 Matt Cutts threw this little nugget to the oft-neglected Local SEO community; “Make a web page for each store location”.

This advice made the murky Local SEO waters for businesses that have multiple locations a little clearer, but still left a lot of tactical questions on how to accomplish this exactly.

In this YouMoz post, I’ll outline a strategy and some tactics I’ve used that have allowed me to help multiple clients achieve high rankings in different cities using only one domain name. These tactics have worked for businesses that have multiple locations, whether they are a large chain, multiple franchises or a law firm with offices in 10 cities.

Benefits of a Single Domain for Multi-location Businesses

[I’m going to use brand.com as an example URL throughout this article but feel free to use your domain of choice in lieu of.]
When Matt Cutts made gave the advice to give each location its own URL, many SEOs thought it was a call to buy many domains for each site. In my experience, that is the wrong way to go. A single domain is the most desirable solution for variety of reasons; a few of those are:

1. No Confusing Branding – This is really simple. Brand.com is not confusing to consumers. WestPalmBeach-Brand.com, on the other hand, is confusing. It brings about questions like: “Is this site legit? Can I get the same quality products and services here that I can at brand.com?” Or the always popular: “hrrm, I can’t remember how to spell the domain’s name again…did it have one hyphen or two?”
2. SEO Efforts are Compounded – If you put all your content on one domain, your SEO efforts in one city benefit the Pagerank or Domain Authority for the entire Domain, and subsequently every city placed on that domain benefits from your SEO efforts. Contrast this with a company that has 20 locations and 20 domains. Their SEO efforts are diluted and they’re running the risk of building a massive link farm if they linked them all together which we know is no bueno. Very no bueno.
3. Lots of Domains Can Get Expensive – Do you really want to have to register citynameBrand.com in all ten of the cities you currently have locations? Oh that’s not a big deal you say? Well how about this: what if your business has these crazy aspirations, I don’t know, to maybe grow outside of those ten cities? Do you really want to preemptively buy hundreds, possibly thousands of domains to keep squatters from trying to leverage your domain name in towns/cities where you don’t even exist? That can get real pricy, real fast. Think if Starbucks had used the multiple domain model. Upon realizing they’re inevitable success and growth, squatters would have been fighting to register every city name/domain name combination in an attempt to scam a ‘buck (pun intended – teehee). Because Starbucks.com is the only web site you need to find every location they own, these guys have no leverage.
4. Content Management – This is something that could be a major downside if you were going to go and create 35 Wordpress installs and then have to login to each one and make changes. A simple change like changing a phone number or a price on 35 sites could end up taking an hour. However, now there are multiple vendors that provide multi-site CMS technology that makes bulk edits a breeze. My company, Bizroids, has white labeled a multi-site CMS solution from 6qube that allows us to edit multiple web sites at once, from one control panel. 6qube even lets you lock certain edit regions on your child sites so you can assign site managers to each site and give them the ability to add content without affecting the design or branding of the site. There’s a few other multi-site platforms out there too that have some similar features.

Measuring Success

So, to be clear, here’s what we are hoping to achieve using a single domain:

1. First page local rankings (also known as maps, 7 pack, Google Local, etc.) multiple cities, towns (note: Moz currently does not report the rankings of map listings but rather, they put a little icon in your ranking report online) which leads to customers buying our products or services.
2. First page regular organic rankings (Moz tracks these just fine), which leads to customers buying our products or services.

Before You Start

Here’s what you’ll want to make sure you have for every address prior to starting this process:

1. A legitimate, physical address (keep it 100% legit here and you’ll save yourself heartache down the road).
2. A unique, permanent phone number that is local to the area.
3. At least one page of high value, 100% unique, SEO optimized content for the geo-targeted keyword.

If you don’t have these three items, don’t bother wasting your time with the rest of the tasks we’re about to get into. You are setting yourself up for failure if you proceed with them.

Decide On URL Structure (Subdomain vs. Subdirectory)

You’ll need to decide on whether to use a subdomain (city.brand.com) or directories (brand.com/city/) URL structure to store your geo-specific city pages.

There’s a lot of information out there debating the merits of the two and Matt Cutts has been very clear (here in 2007 and here in 2012) that there’s no clear distinct advantage between the two, so it really comes down to preference. I prefer subdomains because they are more logical for the end user (in my opinion) and in my experience, more effective for achieving faster SERP on Google.

A big advantage to directories is that if you’re a smaller business and you don’t have a budget for an advanced multi-site CMS, most content management systems like Wordpress will support this URL structure out of the box.

Local SEO Setup Task Checklist

Ok so you have your address, your phone number, your content and your URL structure determined, now it’s time to focus the items that most Local SEOs are familiar with. Keep in mind; each of these tasks needs to be performed for every city that you are optimizing for:

1. Upload unique content to the page designated for each city.
2. Perform on page SEO for each city page and its content.
3. Make sure the city’s NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) are clearly displayed on all city pages and that no other city’s NAP is found in the directory or subdomain. If you want to show nearby locations, link to them or list them as images.
4. Use Schema.org markup to display the address.
5. Configure Google Webmaster Tools for each city.
6. Create Google+ Local pages for each location. Make sure each Google+ Page displays that city’s unique URL, not simply the root domain.
7. Claim all your business listings for each city on GetListed.org. If you have many locations or want to save time, you can try a service like Yext, which will allow you manage 40+ listings from their console.
8. Start link building like you normally would, treating each city directory or subdomain like its own web site.
9. When adding content, always make sure that your content is geo specific otherwise place it on the root domain or a directory, not in a city sub domain.
10. It’s not a bad idea to setup filters in Google Analytics to separate city-specific traffic.
11. As a rule of thumb, treat city subdomains or subdirectories like their own self-contained web site even if you’re managing them all with a single CMS.This includes posting city specific content in the proper place. For instance if you create a picture gallery for your Chicago Cupcake bakery, you would post that content in Chicago.YummyCupcakes.com/Gallery or YummyCupcakes.com/Chicago/Gallery.

The Big No-Nos

If you don’t want to sabotage your local SEO efforts here’s exactly what you should avoid at all costs:

1. Duplicate content anywhere on your site, but especially on city landing pages. Yes this includes recycling a few keywords here and there to make it look different. You can get away with this for a while, but odds are, Google will catch you and it won’t be fun. Plus it’s just a cheesy look for your organization. If you absolutely must have a piece of content in two or more places, make sure to use the rel=canonical tag and to set the duplicates to not be indexed in your robots.txt file.
2. Putting ANY Geo, City information in your home page title tags. I’ve managed a site that used “Company Name | Austin Personal Injury Lawyer” for its home page title tag (while having 17 city specific subdomains), and soon Google was modifying the other 16 locations with “Austin Personal Injury Lawyer” which caused confusion (Google has confirmed they do this to make titles more logical for the end user). We fixed by switching the home page to “Personal Injury Lawyers | Company Name” and while Google still appended many of our city landing page Titles in the SERPS, they only added “Company Name”.
3. List any NAP info on a Geo page other than its own – Example; you don’t want your Austin Texas location page to have a little box that says: nearby locations and list the addresses and phone numbers for the three closest locations. Link to them instead (again, this applies only to your Geo pages because of the signals Google looks for that it will increase its confidence that each location is legitimate). If you want to list all your locations on a page on your main site, have at it.

So that’s the recipe that I’ve used to help many clients with multiple businesses rank for highly competitive keywords in different towns and cities.

I know there’s some theory and subjective arguments to be made here, so let me close with this disclaimer: the methods I’ve shared are white hat to the best of my knowledge and they have yielded results many times over. That being said SEO is, to borrow a term from my good friend Jerry McGuire, a “pride swallowing siege” and as such I’m always open to other’s opinions (especially those speaking from experience). I welcome your feedback and suggestions.