Either you’ve got multiple business locations that you want to rank well throughout as much turf as possible, or you’ve got one location and the same goal.  You may be somewhat more focused on the Google Maps / 3-pack results, but you also want the maximum local visibility in the organic results. In either case you probably want to know what actions can help you in multiple areas at once, and what can help you in one problem area or another.

How can you feed the whole nest of birds at once, and how can you feed the one extra-scrawny bird?  You probably plan to do both, but if you can’t tell the two apart, you can’t put your time, resources, and effort to the best use now.

What do I mean by “help”?  Either bumping up your rankings for terms you already rank (badly) for, or starting to rank for new terms or in new cities/areas where you’re not even on the scoreboard yet.

As you go through the two quick bullet-point lists below, there are 3 basic concepts to keep in mind, which will help make sense of it all:

1. Any work on business listings (Google Business Profile / Google My Business and citations) and reviews only helps one location, typically.
2. Any work on the site or on backlinks can help multiple locations, particularly if you have multiple GBP / GMB pages that all point to the same website domain.
3. Much of your Maps visibility depends on your organic SEO (i.e. site + links).

Steps that can help multiple locations at once (in the Google Maps or organic results or both):

• Getting good inbound links (particularly if they point to the homepage or another page you use as the landing page URL for multiple GMB pages).
• Adding service-related content to the landing page URL(s) you use for GMB.  Usually that’s your homepage, but not
• Adding content about your service area to the landing page URL(s) you use for GMB.  Describe your service area in detail, and go beyond that if you can.
• Creating, expanding, or improving service, product, or bio pages.
• Removing (from the map) widely visible, dominant spammy competitors.  Often they cut into your visibility in multiple areas, or across a large metro area.
• Writing a stronger homepage title tag.
• Adding footer links or other site-wide links to “location” pages, or describing your service area in detail in the footer, or both.
• Standardizing all pages’ title tags so that they all mention your highest-priority services or products, or your highest-priority locations, or both.

Steps that only help one location (in the Google Maps results):

• Getting reviews. People can only review one business at a time, one location at a time.
• Improving the landing page URL on your site, whether it’s your homepage or a location page.
• Squaring away your GMB page: getting the landing page URL right, picking the best category or categories, and not mangling the service-area settings (if applicable).
• Adding keywords to the GMB name. Not saying you should, though.
• Getting a GMB page unsuspended. The status of another page doesn’t affect the one that’s suspended, and vice versa.
• Building or fixing citations.
• Moving to a different address. Or that can hurt you, depending on how and why you choose to relocate.
• Removing smaller, less-dominant spammy competitors.

Any questions or puzzles?

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