Local SEO Guide for Multi-Location Advisor Businesses

How do I make sure we are doing what is best for our company’s SEO even when we have multiple office locations?

This is a question we get a lot when working with advisors on their SEO efforts. It’s not rare nowadays to have multiple office locations and many advisors often come to us worried that they are pigeonholing themselves by promoting only one of their locations. The statistics can’t be ignored — according to Hubspot, 86% of people look for a business using Google Maps. Furthermore, 50% of local-mobile searchers are looking for business information like a local address. which goes to show just how important it is to provide information for each of your business locations. So, in order to avoid confusion, here are 6 things that we recommend you do in order to improve your SEO for multiple locations.

1. Create Location-Specific Landing Pages

Ideally, you would like for each office location to have its own unique, well-optimized landing page. When creating your separate location landing pages be sure to include the following:

1. All the necessary information to contact your business (Name, Address, Phone Number).
2. Driving directions to get to the location.
3. Hours of operation.
4. Any specific local information, such as staff information, testimonials or big news.
5. An embedded Google Map.
6. The team members that serve that location.
7. Location-specific title tags and meta descriptions.

The more information and value that you provide to your visitors on your individual landing pages and the more they serve the intent behind the user search query, then the better these pages will perform!

2. Setup & Verify Separate Google My Business Listings

For multi-location businesses, it is pertinent that you keep it consistent from one location to the next. So, be sure that you sign up for Google My Business, and with this, you can create listings for each individual business location. When adding your website URL to your Google My Business listing, be sure to put the unique URL specific to that location’s landing page.

In addition, it’s important to be sure that the categories you choose as well as your name, address, and phone number are exactly the same. It’s always a good practice to also use local phone numbers and location page URLs that are relevant to each location. Follow Google’s guidelines when setting up your listings and ensure the following:

1. Verify each location.
2. Make sure the listed hours are accurate.
3. Be sure to add photos.
4. Manage and respond to reviews in a timely manner.
5. Make sure the name of each store is consistent.
6. Keep the category of each location consistent.

3. Create Local Content

This tip applied to both your social profiles and your blog. Make your blog a local destination to help build your businesses’ local relevancy. For example, you could write blog posts about local news, what’s happening around your town, local events, local sponsorships or charities. Give the bio portion of your social profiles a “home-town” feel and be sure that it is personalized. People love reading about businesses that have a “human” side as it makes the visitor feel like they can relate on a more personal level.

Twenty Over Ten client, Financial Strategies Group, Inc. does a great job of getting out into their community and helping others and they show this on their Instagram profile. It’s so important to give back to your community and make a difference and this firm is doing a great job at this.

4. Earn Backlinks from Local Organizations

By now, you know the importance of linking when it comes to SEO. When it comes to multi-location SEO, consider sponsoring local events and ask them to link to your location-specific landing page. Ultimately, you want to improve the page rank of each of your new location landing pages. Here are a few ways you can do this.

1. Sponsor local events or participate in events with local charities, as this can help you build links to your pages from event websites and local news outlets.
2. Host events at your business in order to garner excitement and gain links.
3. Host informal, after-hours, meetups at your office.
4. Create locally-focused content that people would be interested in reading and sharing. Host a blog on each of your pages to attract interest and links, then use email and social media marketing to push out your blog content.

Remember, local links aid in local SEO. This goes back to adding a personal touch to your advisor firm to show that you care about the well-being of the people that you work with and that they can trust you to help them make important financial decisions.

5. Include Header Tags With Targeted Local Keyword Phrases

A high-quality H1 header tag with your targeted local keyword phrase is necessary for local on-page optimization. Make sure it’s short, catchy, and includes your targeted local keyword phrase in such a way that it does not appear spammy or keyword stuffed.

While we have discussed how important it is to have keywords in your content, obviously to improve your rankings, it’s so important to avoid “keyword stuffing.” Keyword stuffing is a technique that is considered spamming where keywords are loaded into a site’s meta tags, content, and links in order to try and gain an advantage against competitors in search engine rankings. Keyword density is a calculation used by search engines to determine the relevancy of where sites rank. This may seem harmless, but Google WILL penalize your site if you are caught keyword stuffing by removing your rankings altogether.

In the example below Twenty Over Ten client, Feller Financial Services includes local keywords like “Dedicated Financial Planning and Investment Management Services For South Florida and Beyond” in their header tags, since they are located in Boca Raton, Florida.

6. Optimize Your Foot Header

We recommend that you add all locations directly into the footer space of your website. This should be text, not images or videos etc. Remember that any text in the footer is text on every page so this is the perfect place to indicate your geographic relevance to Google.

Additionally, every single link on your footer is analyzed for SEO ranking, so include links to each of your location-specific landing pages. Lastly, studies show that companies have seen a 50% increase in conversions when they optimized their footers. The footer is the last thing a visitor looks at before leaving your website, so again this is the perfect place to reinforce your locations giving your visitors enough information.

Twenty Over Ten client, HFM Investment Advisors, LLC is located in Glassboro, New Jersey, and that is easily displayed in their footer on every page.

7. Seek Help

Local SEO can be incredibly complex, especially when multiple locations are involved, which is why it’s so important to ask for help if you need it. At Twenty Over Ten, we’re not only helping hundreds of financial advisors launch beautifully designed websites but we are experienced SEO experts that can help you rise to the top. If you do need help with your SEO efforts please consider our SEO Essentials package, which delivers maximum impact by completing the most important SEO tasks in regards to how your website is set up and registered with Google.

Final Thoughts

It’s crucial that you are optimizing your website for Google so that you can have a strong online presence, and this is true even when you have an office in multiple locations. We hope that this has helped you to get a stronger understanding of what it means to boost your SEO locally and that you realize it isn’t going to change overnight for you. However, if you utilize these best practices then you will see a big change in your online presence so ultimately you can drive more traffic and get stronger leads and ultimately clients.