Digital marketing for business based on physical location is
a challenge; i.e. increasing the business’s visibility online so that customers
would view it and visit the business place personally. This scenario mainly
involves local businesses on local franchises of a major brand.
Multi-location brands can work on creating location based
landing pages for their franchises in order convert online visits into personal
visits. These location based pages can be the extension pages of main brand
websites. This way, the brand website gets more chance to occupy substantial
real estate in SERPs. Furthermore, effective marketing strategy can help the
pages of main brand website to even outrun major local websites such as Insider Pages, Yelp and several others.
The main benefit of this kind of local SEO is that the
brand-agnostic potential customers would find more to get impressed from your
business.
Another approach of marketing a multi-location brand is to
allow the franchise owners to develop their own websites. To determine which
one of the two approaches is more beneficial, there needs to be a little
elaboration.
Decentralized Local
SEO
When you establish a decentralized SEO or digital marketing
strategy, you opt to allow the franchise owners to work on their own digital marketing plans. Apart from the fact that they would use your brand name, their
marketing will not come under your management.
The main challenge with this approach is to make sure that
the sites run by your franchises remain prominent in search results. Furthermore,
you will definitely not be able to enhance the authority of your main brand
website. Another drawback of this SEO strategy is that you will lose ranking
and authority drastically if a third party vendor, running your franchise,
decides to end business relationship with you. Then there will be an overhaul
of that franchise website and you will lose traffic.
All you need to do, while working with this SEO plan, is to
consider the fact that your links are not going to be in the central domain but
they will be spread in multiple domains. It means that search engines will get the
main ranking signal, i.e. the links, from different websites rather than the
central one.
Centralized Local SEO
A centralized Indianapolis SEO strategy mainly involves
ensuring that franchisers come directly under your control from the perspective
of digital marketing. Hence, it is the type of strategy which is influenced by
proper communication and collaboration.
When you optimize your website for quite a time, its
authority improves. This enhanced authority provides you with an opportunity to
improve the link acquisition. This factor is one of the main ranking signals
that can help a website to further flourish. Now it would be the perfect time
that you create location based landing pages under the main domain. Those location-based
landing pages will serve the purpose of entertaining geo-modified and non-branded
search queries.
The biggest advantage of having localized pages under main
domain is that it will increase authority and ranking of main website. That way,
you will get a chance to beat the competition even against the big players like
Yelp.