Google: new store location, you need a new page
18 Jun
According to Matt Cutts (Google employee and expert) earlier this month, if you have more than one store location then you need to have a separate web page for each of those.
According to Matt himself:
“If you want your store pages to be found, it’s best to have a unique, easily crawlable url for each store. Ideally, you would also create an HTML sitemap that points to the web pages for your stores (and each web page should have a unique url). If you have a relatively small number of stores, you could have a single page that links to all your stores. If you have a lot of stores, you could have a web page for each (say) state that links to all stores in that state.”
This is great advise to all small businesses who want to improve their online presence both for users as they interact with the site and search engine rankings.
Small businesses, and sometimes bigger ones too (he quotes Pinkberry and their store locations), mess this up by either listing all their store locations on one page or have a search box (as in the Pinkberry case) without a decent HTML sitemap to help the search engines decipher all the locations and individual store pages.
To over come this, Matt goes on to suggest a couple of great tips:
- Make a web page for each store that lists the store’s address, phone number, business hours, etc.
- Make an HTML sitemap to point to those pages with regular HTML links, not a search form or POST requests.
If anyone is worried about point B above, then they’d be rest assured to know that latteperday.com websites create the .xml pages and sitemaps that Google loves to read as well as reader-friendly sitemaps too – so you don’t have to worry that you are covering this base. It’s all done for you.
All you have to do is create a web page for each store that you have and this is easy to do with our easy to use page adding functions. Just add a page, type in the info, add a photo of the store, save.
Google will love it; your users will love it.
Infact, apart from this being great for SEO and Google, this is actually great advice for small business owners who run multiple franchise locations or store locations. Sometimes people don’t just want to land on your homepage. They want to see an individual location page that has the specific info they are looking for (street address, map, opening times, phone number to that store specifically, etc).
Creating these individual pages will give users the info they are looking for and will also come up in a search of google (e.g. “brand name + location”).
Remember, build for users first and Google will love it too.
