A Guide to Placing Locally – One City with Multiple Locations

Local Coffee Shop
Local Coffee Shop

In this series of blog posts on placing for local searches on Google, I’ll take a look at a few strategies that work especially where you operate in one city with multiple locations. Over this week and next, I’ll be looking at other tougher to place scenarios and offering some advice on what to do as well.

The easiest scenario and the first I’ll focus on is where your multiple location business is all based on one city.

Here’s what I’ve found works well for placement for this scenario:

1. Make sure to put your locations with complete address and phone number in the footer of your website. If you have more than three locations this starts to be a little bit cumbersome, but for most businesses your two or three locations can easily be entered in the footer of all pages of your website.

2. Make sure to create a locations page in your website where you’ll list all your locations with full physical addresses, spelled out state name versus abbreviation, zip code and phone number. Link these locations to specially designed pages that show pictures of each location and give a little bit of flavor about what each location offers that may be unique. You may want to include cross streets, specialties, metro directions, and a blurb about the staff. It is crucial that you do not use cookie cutter content for each location simply change the location specifics. Make sure each page is unique and validates as unique using Copyscape Premium (my data checking tool of choice).

3. Set up a Google+ Local page for each location. Understand that there is no scamming Google on addresses. You’ve really got to have a business at the location you register. Google will send to that address a PIN number inside an envelope with no Google branding on it that looks like regular junk mail. It is important that you and your staff really watch for a week for this confirmation letter in order to complete the validation of your Google+ Local page.

The power of placing locally on Google for your individual locations is huge. The reach, potential visibility, and customer traffic you can get from following these very simple steps is not to be discounted. Google is preferring to promote local businesses first in the organic search results so it is very important to capitalize on this to boost your business’ exposure.

 

Can You Ever Recover Traffic After a Link Penalty?

CaptureYour traffic and activity on Google.com has been great for years. Everything looks great, business is trending up and then your traffic crashes, and doesn’t just crash a little, but crashes a lot. Could the image to the right be your website’s history?

If it is the first place to look is your Google Webmaster Control Panel to see if Google has done a manual penalty for link schemes. If you do see the ill-fated message that your site is and has been penalized can you ever fully recover? This article at the MOZ blog states that typically you cannot fully recover the traffic you had before. Giving several examples, the writer visually shows that in some cases a modest return to traffic can be achieved but not usually back to the previous traffic levels.

For some website owners, this is a pretty hard fact to acknowledge; that what their SEO firm or what they have unknowingly have done has impacted their business with no real chance for full recovery. Although each case is unique and the reasons for a Google Smackdown may be different, full recovery may simply not be an option.

Make sure to check into the blog post I mention and review the graphics and charts as they are very telling. What I’ve seen personally is that when a site owner has been hurt with a placement penalty their only recourse for immediate improvement is to move into AdWords with a fairly large click budget while they make a significant effort to remediate the problem. However; it is clear that a business may not always fully recover what it has lost, one, when it comes to trust with Google and two, when it comes to Google driven traffic.

Best Practices for Adding a Mobile Version Website

Google’s been pretty frank with webmasters in that it wants sites in its index to offer the best experience for all users and that means for mobile users too. In the algorithm that racks and stacks website, Google is looking to supply the very best site and one that is optimized for the viewing device.

That means if you do not have a mobile optimized website, you could be losing big traffic and big placement in the months to com. With smartphone use skyrocketing and mobile search activity eclipsing desktops and tablets, what’s a savvy website owner to do?

1. Move to a responsive website design. If you are looking to upgrade your website design, make sure you are planning for the future by embracing a responsive site design. This means that code that renders the page renders different page layouts based on the size of the device screen. Using JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) the same exact content seen with a desktop is automatically reformatted to fit the screen of a smaller device.

2. If you cannot or will not move to a responsive website design for budget reasons or your site is still not “old” or “tired” then make sure that you are using a mobile site “bandaid” tool. Use something like www.DudaMobile.com to create a mobile friendly design for your website now. If you do this, make sure to watch this video from Google’s Matt Cutts to follow Google’s best practices.