For multi-location businesses (MLBs), navigating the complex world of local search optimization can be a daunting task. With the goal of improving visibility, rankings, and overall performance for numerous locations, it’s crucial to have a robust toolset at your disposal.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how multi-location businesses can effectively leverage BrightLocal to understand location performance, deliver on rankings and key performance indicators (KPIs), and showcase their value to stakeholders.
Understanding Location Performance
To ensure that each location is thriving, it’s vital to start with a top-level overview and identify weak spots. BrightLocal’s Horizon is an excellent starting point. Horizon is the only rank-tracking solution that’s purpose-built for multi-location SEO. It enables you to consolidate and visualize ranking performance across hundreds or thousands of locations into a single, intuitive dashboard.
Here’s how you can make the most of it.
Identify Weak Spots
Utilize Horizon to pinpoint locations that may not be performing as well as others. The visual representation helps you identify areas that require attention.
Anything marked in green is in a good position. Anything marked in red needs some attention. For instance, the business in the image below is ranking well in Idaho—3.3. But not so well in Massachusetts—10.1.
To get a better idea of what’s holding these states back, we can click on the square—let’s click on Massachusettes—and we can see which specific locations in that state are struggling to rank well.
In order to dig deeper, we can simply click the locations on the map and we’ll be taken to their individual Local Search Grid reports. Here we can find out what we might be able to do to outrank them.
Identify Top Competitors
Identifying who your main search competitors are becomes complex for businesses with multiple locations. Fortunately, Horizon streamlines this process by pinpointing top competitors for each of your locations, as well as the top one in each state. This allows you to gain insights into your competition nationwide, analyze their strengths, and strategically plan to outperform them, ensuring you stay at the forefront of the game.
Drill Down for Details
Once you’ve identified locations that need improvement, use the single location tools within BrightLocal to dig deeper. Analyze the specific factors affecting performance and make necessary adjustments.
For example, you could check out their individual Local Search Grid report as mentioned above or run a Local Search Audit report to quickly see what’s holding a location back. With this information, you can work out the best course of action.
Help Center: Understanding Your Local Search Audit Report
You can see here that the Location in the image above needs to work on their local listings. Their next steps could be to run a Citation Tracker report in BrightLocal to help them find and fix current listings and uncover new citation opportunities.
Delivering on Rankings and KPIs
If you’re going to deliver on rankings and KPIs, as a multi-location business, you need to use a combination of strategies, tools, and techniques to enhance your online visibility, attract more local customers, and ultimately drive revenue. This often includes optimizing websites, managing online listings, maintaining an active and positive online reputation, and implementing effective marketing campaigns.
BrightLocal offers a range of tools and features to assist you in this area.
Review Generation and Responses
Review Inbox allows you to streamline your multi-location reputation management. You can view, sort, and filter every customer review by status or rating, for every location you manage in BrightLocal, via a single feed. If you have integrated your GBP or Facebook Pages to your reports, you’ll also be able to respond to reviews from these sources directly from Review Inbox.
Learn how to set up and understand Review Inbox here.
Listing Management
Active Sync is a tool that helps you to keep your most important listings accurate and push out updates when you need to.
Help Center: Active Sync Overview
Listings have changed over the last decade. Searchers used to use hundreds of different sites to discover local businesses. However, now just a few key listings dominate: Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), Facebook, Apple Maps and Bing.
These listings have become the key sites that consumers actually use to discover, evaluate and engage with a brand. They also supply your information to other sites and voice-control devices such as:
- Google Business Profile – Google Maps, Waze, Google Home
- Facebook – Instagram
- Bing – Amazon Alexa
Consumers rarely use other listings sites, but they can help businesses to build authority with search engines. Which is where our Citation Builder service comes in. You may be using expensive listing management solutions that hold your data hostage for minimal output; Citation Builder is a managed service where we build out listings for your brand at scale and give you true ownership of your data moving forwards.
Active Sync helps you to take care of those important listings—Google Business Profile, Facebook, Apple Maps, and Bing—all in one place, making sure they are accurate and up-to-date.
Once you have connected to the listings from your BrightLocal account, you can set up additional categories, opening hours, the business description, and additional data such as Google Business Profile Attributes, from your BrightLocal account and push them out to those listings.
Once you’ve set Active Sync up it will then send you alerts when external changes are published to a listing. For example, if a suggested edit is published by Google, you’ll be notified rather than having to log in.
You can either accept or reject the changes suggested within the BrightLocal platform, allowing you to shield the listings from external edits and ensure their accuracy.
Bulk Google Business Profile Posts
GBP Post Scheduler is a true game-changer when it comes to scaling up your Google Posts. It offers effortless scheduling, multi-location distribution, and AI content generation.
As a multi-location business, there could be instances where you need to push the latest national promotions to every location at once. Rather than have to do this one location at a time, you can publish a post to multiple locations simultaneously, saving you potentially hours of tedium. This ensures consistent content across your entire network of locations (or just a select few) in just a few clicks.
You can schedule posts to go out at the exact right time and set the relevant expiry dates to ensure a consistent stream of content for potential customers to engage with. You’ll get full visibility of what’s live, what’s scheduled, and what’s expired from a single dashboard. It’s as easy as setting it and forgetting it! But if you need to make changes, then it’s just a case of editing anything that’s already scheduled or deleting anything that’s live.
You can also say goodbye to writer’s block with our AI-powered content generation. Our integration with ChatGPT ensures that you always have engaging and captivating content at your fingertips. Simply add a description of the message you want to put out, and in seconds, our AI writing assistant will give you content ideas to run with and optimize.
Learn how to bulk post with GBP Post Scheduler here.
Showcasing Value to Stakeholders
Demonstrating the value of your efforts to stakeholders is crucial. BrightLocal offers a range of reporting and auditing tools to help you showcase progress and results.
Rank Tracker Rollup Reports
Keep stakeholders informed about your MLB’s local search rankings with Rank Tracker Rollup Reports. The Rollup Reports feature allows you to present comprehensive ranking data in an easily digestible format.
They can be accessed by clicking the ‘Rank Tracker Rollup Reports’ tab on the Rank Tracker overview page.
Help Center: How to Create a Local Rank Tracker Roll-Up Report
Google Business Profile Audit Insights
Let’s imagine you had a location that was being held back by their Google Business Profile. You picked up on this issue using the BrightLocal GBP Audit tool and made the necessary changes which have improved the number of calls and clicks the location is getting via their GBP. Now, you can demonstrate this by sharing the Insights tab in the GBP Audit report.
For example, the business below optimized their GBP at the end of October and you can see that this has increased the number of website clicks and views on mobile and maps they’ve got since then.
BrightLocal Horizon
Continue to utilize BrightLocal Horizon to visualize progress across your MLB. This tool helps you monitor overall performance and determine where additional focus may be needed.
BrightLocal for Multi-location Businesses
BrightLocal can equip your multi-location business with the tools you need to thrive in the competitive world of local search optimization. By understanding location performance, delivering on rankings and KPIs, and showcasing value to stakeholders, you can your own local SEO efforts to the next level.
To get started and see how BrightLocal can benefit your business, we invite you to speak to our sales team. Start using BrightLocal’s tools and features strategically, and watch as your multi-location business reaps the rewards of enhanced visibility and success.
