Having a well-optimized Google My Business (GMB) listing is critical to any local SEO positioning strategy.
When optimizing a Google My Business listing, many people are unsure which link they should add in the web field; Should the link to the home page or a landing page be? This article, written by Josh Page from www.thesearchequation.com discusses which link to use based on the number of locations your company has and shares interesting information about how Google crawls the page to which it links from GMB.
In this post, we talk about a much-asked question, which arises all the time, and that is: Which page should I link to access my website from my Google My Business listing? In Google My Business, you can enter the URL of your company or business website to link to.
If the business profile has a single location, it will be linked (or should) to the home page. But, let’s say you have five locations. Should you link to the pages for each of the different locations or to the home page? Which page should you link to?
How Google crawls the linked page in Google My Business
Everyone knows that Googlebot is a crawler and therefore crawls the web, collects information from all websites, and includes it in Google’s index. You can see all of this in the Search Console. So Googlebot is crawling, visiting web pages, and collecting data, which it uses to understand the web and classify web pages.
Let’s see what happens when you change the URL in Google My Business.
What happens is that 3 minutes after changing the URL, Googlebot will come and visit your website, the URL of your business that you added in GMB. You can check this by looking at the log file on your website server as soon as you submit the listing for Google My Business to index.
Key factors for Google tracking
If you change the content on your webpage, Google wants to see that to update its listing type locally. This triggers a local crawl. A local crawl is a specific crawl to collect data about that page and associate it with your business entity on Google. It shows you how valuable a page is. Unmistakably, it’s essential to get it right. And then, there are two primary factors that are being considered:
You are looking at the content of that page. But they are also looking at the link’s authority and the integrity of the link you have on that page.
Going back to the question we’re dealing with, which is, you know, which page should you link your Google My Business listing to? You’re trying to balance the authority of your liaison with your relevance or attempting to get the best of both worlds.
One-location business
If you have a business with a single location, this is simple; you link to the homepage because it will have all the authority of the link. Then you also optimise your homepage, the title tag, content, etc., in a way you locate that content for your keywords and your physical location. So, it’s pretty simple if you have a single location.
Multi-Location Businesses (3-5)
What if you have three locations? If you have three business locations, you can probably still get the three main cities on the title label, something like that says you’re a plumber in Sussex, that you have plumbers in Brighton, Horsham and Bexhill. You can optimize the content, putting small blocks that talk about the work you perform in each area. All of that can go on the homepage, so you can still get the benefit of the home page link authority, and you can optimize the content.
When you reach five different locations or locations, everything becomes a little more complicated and inaccurate.
Can you put five city names in your title tag? Probably not. The title is going to be too long and too unnatural.
Can you optimize your content for five different locations? It gets very difficult, although you could try to do it. Still, maybe it’s time to try two different strategies and see which one works best for you. Make location pages one for each location and optimize them as best you can. Next, create diverse GMB listings to link to those location pages, and then run it for a couple of weeks by keeping track of the positions for each of the locations for the services you offer in each of them. Then change it to the home page, run it for a couple of weeks with position tracking, and see which one works best.
Businesses with six or more locations
If you have six or more locations, it’s too hard to optimize your content and media for all those locations on the homepage, and you’re not going to get those strong signs of relevance. I would suggest at that point linking each location to a specific landing page for each location.
You have a very specific page built for that location; you’ve put a ton of great content on that page. Then it would help if you tried to get as many links as you can to each of the location pages. You want to get:
- A good internal link to those location pages on your website.
- Link from any other website that you have access to link to location pages from them. Wherever you can control the links, those are excellent opportunities to get links.
- If you are a sponsor of some kind of event, you can get some links to those pages from the pages of those events.
You can also get links to local trade association pages. So, if you offer a business in one area and also in another area, then link to those landing pages in that specific location.