Enterprises with multiple locations that want to use local rank tracking to support enterprise growth face unique challenges when it comes to monitoring and optimizing their local SEO.
Whether you're an agency professional working with multi-location clients or part of an in-house marketing team at a multi-location organization, it's important to understand how to efficiently and effectively perform local rank tracking for businesses with multiple locations.
Not only will following some guidelines for multi-location rank tracking help you maximize your time and budget, it will also help ensure you get the clean data you need for a sounder overall local SEO strategy — and improve each location's position in search engine page results (SERPs) over time.
Tips for Doing Local Rank Tracking for Businesses with Multiple Locations
Choose a Local Rank Tracker with Multi-Location Support
While it takes a little more planning to track local SERP rankings for businesses with multiple locations, using the right local rank tracker that offers features for doing so, such as Local Falcon, makes it a lot easier.
The local rank tracking tool you use should offer ways to set up recurring automatic scans for multiple locations, so you don't have to manually scan each location's rankings every time you need new data.
Local Falcon, for example, has a Campaigns feature that allows you to set up automatic scans for multiple business locations using the same scan settings, including keywords, grid size, and grid radius.
It's also ideal if your local rank tracker provides location reports as an optional report type, so you can instantly see and compare data for each business location from all the scans you've run over time.
Ensure Each Location's Google Business Profile Is Complete
With multiple business locations, it's easy for something to fall through the cracks when it comes to their individual Google Business Profiles. So, before you begin local rank tracking for a multi-location business, make sure that each location's Google Business Profile listing is fully completed and up to date.
This means filling out all the contact information, adding all relevant business categories, and verifying any unverified business locations.
This ensures that each location's business listing has the minimum amount of information required to create a strong baseline from which you can track performance and start making optimizations to improve rankings.
Set Up Local Rank Tracking Campaigns for Similar Business Locations
As we touched on earlier, using a local rank tracker that allows you to set up rank-tracking campaigns for multiple business locations will save you a lot of time when tracking local rankings for multi-location businesses.
However, this works best when you set up separate campaigns for similar business locations. In other words, don't set up a campaign for locations in different cities or areas with vastly different population densities, for which using the same keywords and other scan settings wouldn't make sense.
Let's say a bank or credit union has multiple branches in the same city — you could create a local rank tracking campaign for all of these locations because the keywords people are using to find them would be the same and the population density of where they are located would be relatively similar.
On the other hand, if a business like a tire shop has three locations in a city and two locations in rural areas, you would want to set up two separate campaigns, one for the urban locations and one for the rural locations, since key scan settings like the map scan's grid size and radius would need to be different.
Use a Mix of General and Geo-Specific Keywords
The keywords you choose to scan for are another important part of local rank tracking for multi-location businesses.
If you're setting up bulk auto-scans for multiple locations, you want to ensure the keywords you use are relevant for all of them and include a mix of general and geo-specific keywords that people are using to find the business.
General keywords should be terms related to the goods or services a company provides, while geo-specific keywords should be variations of the business name and its services followed by variations of the business's location, such as the full city name and any abbreviations or nicknames.
Compare Locations
This might sound obvious, but when you're doing local rank tracking for multi-location businesses, it's important to actually compare their performance, rather than treating each location as a separate entity.
You should be looking for performance trends, patterns, and areas of opportunity over time, and use locations that are performing well to help identify how you can improve the local SEO for locations that are underperforming.
Remember that local SEO is an ongoing process, and what's working for one location right now might not work as well in six months or a year, so constant comparison and analysis of data from different locations is essential.
Wrapping Up
Efficient local rank tracking for multi-location businesses is vital for improving local SEO and supporting enterprise growth.
In order to effectively track local search rankings for enterprises with multiple locations, make sure to choose a tool like Local Falcon with multi-location support, complete Google Business Profiles, set up separate campaigns for similar locations, use a mix of general and geo-specific keywords for tracking, and compare performance to identify trends and areas for improvement.
With ongoing analysis and optimization, even businesses with locations in many different areas can stay ahead in the competitive local search landscape and drive growth across all locations.
