Local SEO: Rank Multiple Locations 2018 (One Address)

Rank Multiple Locations (One address)

How to Rank Multiple Locations is a common question we get local SEO agencies get. 

People want to Rank Multiple locations of the city that their brick-and-mortar is in but they have challenges ranking in the surrounding cities.

We actually got a question from Louise in New York and she asks”Is it possible to rank outside the city my business is located in” For example “my dry-cleaning company is in New York City, but we service Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens but can’t seem to rank there.”

This is very common question that we get from potential clients and from  existing client regarding local SEO.

We should mention that this does not pertain to local businesses with multiple locations, this pertains to when you want to rank in a city beyond the city where your your brick-and-mortar is located.

Multiple Locations Google User Experience

The first thing to understand is that, Google is very focused on user experience. When you are trying to rank outside your city, you have to understand that if somebody in Brooklyn is searching for a “dry cleaner near me” or “dry cleaner in Brooklyn”, Google does not want to present them with results in New York City.

Because they’re not gonna want to drive there or they’re not gonna want to take a train there or whatnot so they want to present searches that are local, that pertain to a local business and that has to do with proximity.

So that is a user experience factor that Google takes into account, which is why it is so hard to rank in a city that you’re not in for a local business.

Most the time people when they ask this question, their goal is to rank Google’s map pack.

They want to rank in the map for a city that they’re not in, to showcase that they service the the search query.

If somebody’s in Brooklyn and there’s a great dry cleaner in New York City, they want to show up there they’d want to show up for that search because they think they deserve it. because maybe they already have clients in that location.

There are some ways to do that and we can go over them now.

Organic Listings Multiple Locations

One strategy that tends to work the best is to shoot for organic listings, rather than the map pack.

You can do this by creating unique service pages for all those places for all the cities that you want to rank in.

If you are that “New York City dry cleaner” and you service the surrounding cities, you would actually create a dry cleaning service page for that city as well, for ie:

• Dry Cleaners Manhattan
• Dry cleaning Brooklyn
• Dry Cleaning Queens

Create pages for all of the surrounding cities that you wanted to rank in.

Service Areas Multiple locations

The second thing that you want to do along with this organic strategy is actually put a “areas we service” item in your top menu. On the header have a drop-down or have that page lists out all the cities you service and actually link to those individual pages.

You’ll want to link to those individual pages from other pages on your site, to spread the authority and to increase increase the ranking potential of those other City searches as well.

When you do this rather than maybe hide that on the footer, as you see a lot of sites that will hide the areas they serve in the footer to try to rank like that.

They don’t actually show it forward-facing to consumers on their website, they put it in their sitemap only or they put it in their footer links.

What you really should do is, put it in the areas you surf section right in your top menu and build internal links to it.

That should really service that aspect of ranking organically, it can still be challenging to outrank your competitors like that.

But if you do all the other SEO stuff right and you have good domain authority then you have you stand a strong chance of coming up in other searches that are outside your city.

The other thing you can do that’s outside of organic SEO is of course do pay-per-click advertising using Google Adwords. We like to use ad extensions, there’s a newer feature for our clients to try to rank outside the cities that they’re in.  Hopefully that helped clear up some of the air on how to rank outside your city, if you have any other questions please send them in comments or email us through the site