Local sites for national brand

Concerned about SEO and management issues

[mwDev]

I'm working with a client who is expanding from one location into a (nominally) national brand. Two new locations are opening across the U.S. from the parent location, with several others scheduled to come online during the second half of this year. After that -- who knows, but I've heard projections of 30-40 locations by the end of 2022.

The owners want each location to have its own cloned website with just the location and contact information customized. (Kind of like those multilevel marketing sites except named after cities instead of anonymous ID's.) Local owners would probably also have some ability to add content, such as a blog, weekly specials, etc. The cloned sites would be on their own subdomain (or perhaps a subdirectory) of the main site.

I've been out of the SEO world for a while, but I'm concerned that plan won't work well for local SEO and could potentially harm everyone for duplicate content.

What's considered best practice these days for deploying local sites for a national brand? I'm interested in overarching concepts (particularly relating to local SEO), as well as specific technologies for deployment and management.

[lammert]

Do you want each sub-site to be accessible through Google Search, Google Maps or only through the main website?

With search, you have to do more than just change the address page of each sub-site. Otherwise Google will mark the pages as identical and all but one or a few of them will be hidden in the SERPs.

Google Maps makes it a little bit easier. You can link each sub-site to the GMB listing for that location.

If visitors access through the main site, you could use a GeoIP location database to re-direct them directly to the correct sub-site.

Be sure in all cases where the pages are (almost) identical to have your canonical URLs mentioned correctly in all versions to prevent that Google assumes you try to game the system.

[mwDev]

Thanks for your reply. The main need is for our locations to show up when local searchers go looking for widgets. I haven't looked deeply into GMB before, but from some cursory research it looks like it will handle that need just fine.

What about a GMB listing for each location, with the website being listed as that location's page in our store locator over at the main site? Sounds like that should work, provided we keep the static content sparse and give each location some space for at least a few paragraphs of unique content.

[lammert]

That should work. You can manage all locations from one central GMB account and assign rights to other users for the single locations. When management changes on one location, you can simply assign the access rights to that store to another user. If you let every location create their own listing, you may run into difficulties when local management changes.

Individual location managers can manage photo's and other information which is specific for their listing.

Try to use unique contact information for all the GMB listings. A common error is that nation-wide companies add one central phone number to all listings. While this may be convenient from a company point of view, having unique phone numbers for each location is an important signal to Google. The same for the website URL for each listing. It should point to a page or site which is specific for that location, not a general nation-wide landing page.

[mwDev]

Great advice, thanks! We will definitely be using local numbers for each location. That was already a strategic decision simply to add a more personal touch to each location.