Web structure for local business

Great news, we expanded the business and created franchises!

And I'm not referring to “TheCookies”, no man, I'm referring to the Avocado Toast cafeteria that Nagore set up and that I told you a few months ago in this post about how to create a Google Business Profiles listing optimized for local SEO.

The truth is that since Nagore it opened its doors it has not stopped growing and its toast with avocado and rye bread are already famous all over the city.

So much so, that he has had the opportunity to set up a franchise in Valencia and another in Madrid.

Avocado Toast grows and expands.

This fictitious situation is one of the possibilities that exist when your business is doing well and you want to scale up. Open new locations.

Right now there are certain critical situations for the digital path of the business.

If the project didn't have a clear intention of expanding from the start, it's possible that your entire business identity is tied to the location where you have your first store.

In the case of Avocado Toast this has been the case. All information links the brand name and products to the city.

It's a problem, but at TheCookies we're going to solve it in the best possible way, and this is the topic I'm presenting to you today.

How to work the web structure of local businesses with multiple locations

Let's not waste another minute and we will understand the problem we are facing.

First of all, the Avocado Toast website has a structure completely designed to be a single-location business. For this reason, the optimization and description of the project focuses on providing product data and the location within the map.

Business name that includes the city, address, local phone number... luckily the domain doesn't contain the name of the city, that would be the worst case scenario, including a domain migration along the way.

All this optimization that we are seeing works from the cover, which acts as a landing page with general information about the brand, such as an SEO landing optimized for terms such as “brunch in Zaragoza” or “breakfasts in Zaragoza”.

*** What's the problem you'll ask yourself? ***

Well, we have several.

The first is a problem at the structural level of the website. We have built the cover as a local landing and now we will have to grow with other local landings in parallel with another structure designed for them.

*** Does this make sense? ***

The truth is that very little. In a structure designed from scratch, all local landings would be in the same vertical and the Home would be reserved as a page aimed at presenting the project or brand and providing general contact information or referring traffic to the different local landings.

**What does this mean for the project as it stands? **

Looking at the structural tree that I indicated before, we need to make a move within the optimization and content of the web, creating a new local landing for the Zaragoza franchise, and give all possible signals to Google so that it understands that the page that responds to that search intention is no longer the home page, but a local internal landing like the one we have created for the rest of the cities.

When we have to do this type of operation, the customer's question is always the same.

*** How long will it take Google to replace one URL with the other? ***

The answer is a manual “it depends”.

What we have observed is that the longer that Home has been optimized with local terms, the more authority it has gained for those types of terms and intent and the longer it takes to recognize the variation.

How to move local optimization from a home to a city landing

Here I'm going to tell you some of the most useful tips for any project where you have to do this task.

Note that this is a healing task and that it occurs because the previous structure of the web ceases to make sense and the action is taken to correct.

The ideal would have been to have information about a possible opening of new franchises since the beginning of the web project, but we understand that this is something that is not always possible.

Having clarified the above, let's go with the actions that have the most impact on this movement:

MODIFYING OPTIMIZATIONS WITH LOCAL TERMS

The first action for this move is to remove all terms that refer to the local franchise from the cover.

This means that we will change the search intent that the home resolves, and we will remove all content blocks that apply to a local search intent, such as:

• Steering block
• Location map
• Local Business Ratings *...

NEW METADATA

Another key point is to thoroughly clean and replace meta information that we may be giving to search engines with a new one without local concepts.

Review the following:

• Meta title
• Meta description
• Local Schema Markup

Fill in these fields with purely brand terms and that don't refer to the city we're moving from URL.

INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL LINKING

The structure is also defined by the link architecture of a website.

One of the tasks of this process will be to check that each internal link that the home receives does not have a link to the local business.

If we see that there are links that point to the home with an anchor like “breakfast restaurant in Zaragoza”, obviously we must change its destination URL to the new landing page that we have created to meet that search intention.

We are going to control all the links in top, side navigation and footer that may be complying with what I said previously, but it would also be interesting if we did a crawl of links that come from our blog or the rest of the pages of the site and that may contain some optimization or local search intention to modify the destination URL.

This part is the simple one, now it's time to play the part that is more complicated, which is to control external links.

First of all, it starts with all the social profiles that have a local load, such as the Google Business profile, the tabs in the local business directories where you have editing power and in spaces where you have the ability to modify the URL with which you are linking to your website.

**It's not about deleting these links hey, we're not crazy. **

It's about pointing them to that new landing that we've created and that we're trying to replace the home for local terms.

If you want to do everything correctly, I recommend that you contact those other portals that refer to the local business but link to the domain's home page.

You send an email and explain the topic to them, it is possible that some will do you the favor of modifying it, others may not even respond to you. You have to try.

GENERATES MORE SIGNALS THAT POINT TO THIS NEW LANDING

We need more impacts on this new local page that we are migrating.

To achieve this faster, I recommend that you obtain new links from specialized portals or local media and that they point to this new URL.

Combine this with PPC campaigns that attack an audience in that location and drive traffic to the new URL.

Changes in the architecture of internal links

A simple local business website has a very simple, practically horizontal structure, where the top navigation usually gives direct access to the rest of the sections and does not require second levels or similar.

However, when we move to a more complex model such as the one we are transforming in this post, the navigation must be adjusted to set up a useful internal link structure.

In addition to the usual navigation spaces such as menu bars, you can insert blocks of contextual links that allow the user to access all local landings.

This is a common way of distributing traffic that arrives and navigates through the home page, despite the need for a local URL.

Do products or services need to be created for each city?

This is one of the recurring doubts when we start to have several locations.

*** Do I have to create a service page for each city? ***

• Breakfast in Zaragoza
• Breakfast in Madrid
• Snacks in Zaragoza
• Snacks in Madrid *...

**Definitely NOT. **

This type of construction makes portals have a delusional structure, without any kind of meaning other than offering landings with a very precise search intention but with also very high duplicate content.

My recommendation is that you create generic service or product landings and that you link from those landings to the cities where they are offered.

What should a web structure for a franchised business look like?

Apart from the fictitious example I give you, I have been working with clients who have this type of business structure for a long time and have had to adapt their website to this new situation.

I leave you here the structure and internal link that we have built and that once it is deployed, the only work you have to do is to ensure that the content optimizations respond correctly to the search intention of the local user and the relevance of the brand grows from the city environment, with searches like KW+target city or neighborhood.

Starting from the previous tree, I'm going to give you an example of how to connect each of the city URLs with the rest of the sections of the site.

CITY WITH SERVICE

Each city will have to be linked to the service it offers and not use a generic block.

If Zaragoza offers Events - Birthdays in this case, you will need to have a link from your landing to the “Birthday” landing page

In addition, a return link must be created from the service to the city if it is available.

As in Zaragoza, the restaurant offers the option of “Birthday” events, we will have to add a link from the Birthday page to the URL of the city of Zaragoza.

It's very simple, each City must link to the URL of the product and service it offers and should receive a link back from those landings.

OPTIMIZATION OF SERVICES AND PRODUCTS

This is very important, in an example like the one we have seen, events and types of food must be completely neutral at the location level.

It means that we should not include content that mentions the city + event or city + product.

This type of references will have to be worked from local landings with specific blocks to optimize that search intention.

This is all.

I think I've given you enough material to reflect on and rethink any project of this style.

We will continue to publish more posts on local SEO topics until we cover all the needs you may have when it comes to taking your local business to the top, or at least trust that we can do it for you 😊