Listing Management for 100+ Locations

[Adamk]

Hi,
Is anyone interested in discussing the differences between working with SMB's and Regional/National brands? In our experience, the best practices for the 2 are completely different. Do you agree?
We are putting together a best practices for multi location companies. 100-4000 locations, similar to Local Search Ranking Factors.
Any participants?

 

[Linda Buquet]

I Adam, brave mission. Even when I worked directly with clients I would not accept even a 3 office multi-location client due to all the extra issues.

So like I said brave and a very worthy and commendable cause. But not my area of expertise so can't weigh in. But I hope others will.

I know some of you even specialize in big chains and franchises.
Anyone care to participate?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Adam have you reached out to Myles at BrightLocal about this?

He has lots of big agencies and also does lots of surveys and stuff, maybe he'd be interested in partnering on this effort somehow?

 

[Adamk]

Extra issues, mildly put. Our minimum is 100 locations and we scale up to 5,000 locations, per brand. I hope there are other folks willing to accelerate this topic.
Have a great day!!

 

[Broland]

I'm happy to help if you have specific questions. The algo and ranking factors are the same, so it often actually isn't too different - can just be overwhelming and a lot more to deal with. It usually gets easier to rank as you add more locations.

 

[manny1020]

Any updates on this OP? Have you found anything useful?

I am getting ready to manage digital marketing at a regional level for a national brand services company, taking care of about 30 locations, and for the last week I've been working out how I will go about optimizing for Local.

I've found that besides the need for landing pages for each location that is within the major company website, the process would be similar to ranking single location SMB's in terms of best practices.

Things to note:

Think of each landing page as its own website.

On each landing page, have only that location's NAP.

Schema markup the address on each landing page.

Have unique content for each landing page as to avoid duplicate content issues.

Wish I could add to this but gotta run!

 

[thetylerbarnes]

I work with a large SEO agency and manage 100+ location listings. Unfortunately, Google Places does not offer an API feature that pulls impression data directly. This causes a huge amount of pain every month when I manually type this data into Excel for all 100+ locations.

Other than the issue of Google Places, multi-unit local SEO management can be fairly straightforward with some time spent installing cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics then setting up a solid local SEO dashboard.

Another piece that is extremely important is ensuring NAP data is accurate across all listings. This gets REALLY hairy when working with a corporate structure that does not move nimbly. I have my "local-master-master-file.xls" (it's so important it has 2 masters) which tracks all of the data across all platforms. I always update the Excel sheet first.

 

[Jason]

I manage several large business with 300-500 locations each. I'm interested in participating if this is still ongoing.

 

[ABL3]

Adam,

Maybe setting up an online survey to be filled out, would be a good way to get participation. The challenge is managing in scale, and having the tools / staff in place to manage the volume of data sets.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Andrew and welcome! Thanks for joining us.

 

[Adam Steele]

I have found the challenge wasn't so much ranking, as it was managing all those damn listings. Ideally, you'd want to check on each of the listings each month, which is can be a real nightmare. Doable in the 3 figure range, but beyond that you either have to outsource a process or subscribe to some listing management software. Software is good to a point. It is kind of...reactive. It will show you problems when there are problems. Whereas you'd want to discover the problem before it becomes one. Hence a regular check up.

It is a huge undertaking, and as Linda suggested, brave.

Biggest I ever worked with had a few hundred locations, and would be happy to lend any insights.

 

[manny1020]

I have found the challenge wasn't so much ranking, as it was managing all those damn listings. Ideally, you'd want to check on each of the listings each month, which is can be a real nightmare. Doable in the 3 figure range, but beyond that you either have to outsource a process or subscribe to some listing management software. Software is good to a point. It is kind of...reactive. It will show you problems when there are problems. Whereas you'd want to discover the problem before it becomes one. Hence a regular check up.

It is a huge undertaking, and as Linda suggested, brave.

Biggest I ever worked with had a few hundred locations, and would be happy to lend any insights.

Adam, did you ever work with businesses that had locations very near each other? I am working with a client that has 6 locations in the same city, and I'm wondering if it would be possible to rank all locations in the first page for the Google Local 7 pack for this city. They are all linking to their respective landing pages, and one of the listings is actually on the first page for Google Local, but I'm wondering if it would be possible to have these other locations pop up there as well.

I know at a more hyper local search level such as at a community level, these other clinics will have priority, bu I'm wondering how this will work at a city level.

Also, how would you go about tracking Google Local results? Would you just keep track of the specific rankings, or did you use analytics that were presented to clients?

Any suggestions or advice for managing multiple locations of the same business would be awesome!

 

[Adam Steele]

In the case that comes to mind, we used the home page as his single landing page for Google Local, and had locations in 4 parts of the city. Occasionally they would come up in the same SERP, but not that often. Much because there was a lot of competition for the terms. I would suspect depending on which part of the city you were searching from, you would see a different iteration of that SERP.

I think of businesses like Starbucks who might be faced with this. Strangely, I just went to search "coffee vancouver" and starbucks didn't show up once. I guess they aren't too successful with it!

I could see this POSSIBLY being concerned domain crowding, but I can't imagine it being against the rules, or Google actively doing anything about it. I could be wrong here of course. I mean, it is a real world thing, it's not like you're gaming anything.

Fair game I say, promote them all!

Yah, most SERP trackers are going to track the first result for your domain, and stop there. They won't tell you that you own position 2 and 3 as well. SO, I would go about this manually. OR, you might try Whitespark's local rank tracker. I haven't played around with it a ton, but I know they have been making strides. It would probably go beyond because it looks at rankings not specifically at a URL level, but a location level. I believe.

As far as traffic and conversions, GA should cover all your bases here.

Imagine a thread without mentioning Whitespark, right?

 

[manny1020]

In the case that comes to mind, we used the home page as his single landing page for Google Local, and had locations in 4 parts of the city. Occasionally they would come up in the same SERP, but not that often. Much because there was a lot of competition for the terms. I would suspect depending on which part of the city you were searching from, you would see a different iteration of that SERP.

I think of businesses like Starbucks who might be faced with this. Strangely, I just went to search "coffee vancouver" and starbucks didn't show up once. I guess they aren't too successful with it!

I could see this POSSIBLY being concerned domain crowding, but I can't imagine it being against the rules, or Google actively doing anything about it. I could be wrong here of course. I mean, it is a real world thing, it's not like you're gaming anything.

Fair game I say, promote them all!

Yah, most SERP trackers are going to track the first result for your domain, and stop there. They won't tell you that you own position 2 and 3 as well. SO, I would go about this manually. OR, you might try Whitespark's local rank tracker. I haven't played around with it a ton, but I know they have been making strides. It would probably go beyond because it looks at rankings not specifically at a URL level, but a location level. I believe.

As far as traffic and conversions, GA should cover all your bases here.

Imagine a thread without mentioning Whitespark, right?

Thanks for this Adam, really helpful stuff. I'm currently using the Whitespark Local Citation Finder, and will definitely look into the Local Rank Tracker.

 

[Myles Anderson]

Hi guys - i'm coming to this discussion a bit late.

I'd by happy to host a hangout to discuss the topic of listing management for businesses with multiple locations and invite a number of well known 'locals' to participate - ?

 

[Mary Bowling]

I have experience with multi-location businesses. Ranking is not that much of an issue in many cases because of the domain authority of the parent website of a big brand. However, a lot of them get it wrong on their store locators a with a severe lack of crawlability, poor structure, duplicate or near duplicate content, and lack of proper optimization for local search. Fixing these things takes elbow grease but it's not tricky at all. As others have stated, it's the data inconsistency - and lack of any scalable way to fix it - that kills you.

 

[sergiuliano]

any updates on this topic? I would like to join brainstorming on this subject.

have anyone found a solution to automatically track impressions under My Business Insights? We might consider to develop such an app in case it is still needed.

bdw @Adam - we are able to rank track all position for a certain URL in TOP100 results since the beginning of 2014

 

[Doug Cooper]

any updates on this topic? I would like to join brainstorming on this subject.

have anyone found a solution to automatically track impressions under My Business Insights? We might consider to develop such an app in case it is still needed.

bdw @Adam - we are able to rank track all position for a certain URL in TOP100 results since the beginning of 2014

I know this is an old thread but tracking impressions from a holistic view in GMB is still very much needed. I have clients with hundreds of locations and there is no way I could go to each location one by one to get impression data. I mean I "could" but I would be pulling numbers for weeks.