You may hear a lot of talk about there being “over 200 Google ranking factors,” and while that’s technically true, they do not all carry the same weight. There are a handful of ranking factors that account for most of the outcome when it comes to local rankings. The big ones are:

1. Google Business Profile – number and quality of reviews, optimisation of profile name, optimisation of description text and services. These are all key for ranking in the local pack.
2. Local citations – having links coming to your site from important and relevant local directory websites, with consistent Name – Address – Phone Number data.
3. Local pages with relevant location content and solid on-page SEO. This means optimised META tags, headlines, body content, images and preferably a video.
4. High quality inbound links and internal linking structure. Links are still used as Google’s biggest indicator of ‘authority’ or ‘importance’. Without good links you simply will not get #1 rankings on super competitive keywords, it’s really that simple.
5. Schema markup. This is a more technical aspect of local SEO but can still be important particularly in more competitive markets.

One of the major blunders I see regularly (often committed by agencies) is adding way too many location pages, or adding multiple pages with effectively the same content.

Location pages are important but they need to be done well. Content quality rules always apply – it’s a matter of making sure you have a unique, useful page for each location, not simply a copy-paste of another page with the location words switched. Proliferating these kinds of thin or near-duplicate pages will not work and can actually have a negative long term effect on your performance.

The other major pillar of a multi-location SEO strategy is having optimised Google Business Profiles for each location (formerly called Google My Business). These are the listings that contain your Google reviews, show up on Google Maps, and can get you into the coveted ‘Map 3-Pack’ that shows up at the top of local search results.

This is not always a straightforward process, as Google automated systems have been known to flag additional locations as ‘duplicate’ if they are not set up correctly – even when they are clearly at a different physical address from an existing listing.

What is little understand among local SEO agencies as well is that there are shared ranking factors between the website itself and the GBP listing. There is a synergy between the two of them – the Google Maps rankings will perform better when there is a coherent local SEO strategy being deployed on the website, and likewise the website will rank better with a well-optimised GBP listing (or listings) attached to it.

One of the fundamentals of local SEO for multi-location businesses is having a localised content structure with properly optimised, relevant landing pages for each location – but it’s very easy to get this wrong, and I see the same mistakes being made over and over again, even by digital agencies who should really know better. Seemingly small issues, like incorrectly optimised META tags, can create a massive drag on performance and substantially add to the cost.

This is why it’s so important to have your keyword research thoroughly mapped out by a professional and then a logical content structure built out in accordance with that plan. You may only need one page for each location. You may need multiple pages for each location to cover different services. In some cases you may be able to cover several lower-competition locations with a single page.