Sphinn - Local SEO For Retail Store Locators

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Sphinn It!

Went Hot: September 16, 2007 - 5:07 am
Posted By: MattMcGee 393 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Local & Maps

Wow, great article with *practical* local search advice for anyone who has multiple business locations in different areas. Well done, Chris!

5 Comments

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Comments

from MiriamEllis 393 days ago #

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Nice one. Hey, Matt...how do think this would be affected by an included footer file? In the case of a business with a single location, it's a no-brainer to put the address in the footer...but if you had 10 toy stores, and were creating an individual page on the master site for each of the locations, what ought you to do with the footer? Make it unique on each of the pages? Not include an address at all?

What I'm imagining is, say, your corporate headquarters are in San Jose, CA. You've got this data in the footer. What would Google think of an inside page optimized for, say, Little Rock, Arkansas, but with a footer for San Jose, CA? How would they read this conflicting data? What would you think or suggest, Matt?

Miriam

from Silver 393 days ago #

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Thanx, Matt!

Miriam: good questions! I think you have a good point - having that corporate address in all a site's footer pages, including store location pages, would likely be a little bit of a bad idea in this case.

I say that because the page would be slightly "muddier" from the perspective of the search engine. My recommendation about creating an individual profile page for every store location was done with the intention of making a page that's highly focused and specifically relevant to the particular address/city/state of that store, coupled with the company's brand name. Having an additional location address on the same page is just a bit detracting from this purpose, although I think the store locator pages could/would still likely perform very well for local search.

In the case you cite, I'd suggest the site use a different footer file for their store locator section in order to leave off the HQ address.

Most large companies aren't interested in driving lots of premise traffic to their headquarters building -- they're far more interested in driving the consumer traffic to their actual stores.

from MiriamEllis 393 days ago #

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Hi Silver,

Yes...what you are saying makes sense to me. It seems like the unique footer element would likely be a very important part of optimizing the individual location pages, in fact. Thanks for replying!

Miriam

from MattMcGee 393 days ago #

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I was just looking at a law firm web site a couple days ago. The footer listed all five locations they have, and they had contacted me asking about local SEO. I thought, "Yikes. Gotta lose that right there."

So I'm with Chris all the way on this. I think you need to ditch any potentially confusing geo-data on these individual store/location pages.

from identity 392 days ago #

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Great article Chris. There are some real wins that businesses can make here that will only become even more important as local/mobile take on even greater importance. So many miss on this as these locators, if they even have them, are often behind javascript, AJAX, or Flash and popup windows. Having separate pages for each location provide a great opportunity to provide even more useful content, like listing local events, seminars, speakers or anything else happening at a specific location, that not only better serves visitors, but provides more opportunities to rank for even more search terms.