Optimizing Your Website for Multiple Locations

If your business serves multiple locations you can employ a number of different optimization approaches to reach these groups. One method that can be particularly effective involves optimizing individual pages on your website for each different location.

This type of targeting can be done on any level whether it’s city, state or area specific. When customers search for local keywords, this will give your business the greatest chance of being found in organic search results.

How to Optimize Each Location Page: Optimizing each location page to appear for local searches uses the same basic principles found in any SEO campaign.

Keyword Selection: Use your core set of keywords along with location based modifiers. For example, if your business is a Web Designers you may like to use terms like, Web Design New York, SEO New York, New York Web Developer etc.

On Page Optimization

• Use the one core key-phrase along with the location you are targeting in the filename of the web page.
• Use your local based keywords in the Title and Description Meta tags on the page.
• Use one of your main keywords and the location in the H1 (heading) tag for the page.
• Write about 3-4 paragraphs of content on the page and include the keywords identified above throughout this copy.
• If your business delivers to the local area you may wish to include some of the suburbs you deliver to for some additional local targeting.

If you have multiple office locations there are a number of additional optimization steps you can take for each page. The image below gives a nice overview of how these pages can be structured.

Using this strategy for your most important local markets is a good way to get noticed and improve your ranking in organic search results.

How to Keep Your Google Ranking during a Website Re-design

One of the biggest factors the search engines use when determining your ranking is trust. Google is more inclined to trust a site that has been in existence for a while and that has many incoming links to it. Often, when rebuilding a site, you end up changing the URLs of your web pages. The problem is though that these new URLs don’t have the trust that the old URLs do, even if a lot of the content is the same.

When you take your established content and place it somewhere else, you are effectively resetting the clock on when that content was created and breaking all of the inbound links that pointed to it.

How can you re-establish this trust with the search engines?

The most effective way to tell the search engines that you’ve moved your content is through the 301 redirect. By setting up 301 redirects for your content, you show search engines where your content has moved from, and your inbound links will now direct to your new pages.