Relevant and accurate local listings and pages have never been more important for multi-location brands. However, managing these is no easy feat for companies with hundreds or thousands of locations.

Increasingly multi-location brands are enlisting the support of a local marketing partner who provides them with the technology, process, and people needed to manage and optimize local marketing at scale, but what does that look like in practice? 

Previously we’ve shared tips on finding the right local marketing partner and building your local dream team (check out this webinar, ICYMI, or this ebook, The Go-To-Guide For Selecting an Enterprise Local Marketing Solution). Now you’ll learn more about what happens once you have done this. 

This article covers how you get started and what we offer to ensure the most successful outcomes from your enterprise brand’s local program. 

A Dedicated Team Who Helps You Reach Success

When you partner with Rio SEO, you are assigned a Project Manager, an Account Director, Listings Coordinator, SEO Strategist, and Executive Sponsor. These search professionals, each with an extensive background in enterprise local marketing, are your dedicated representatives and an extension of your in-house team. They serve as both your ally and resource for achieving results. They are responsible for: 

Ensuring location information is accurate

Any time you have a location information change, our team implements that on your behalf. A support specialist will update your changes, whether it be a change in hours of operation, a new address, or something else, on our centralized platform. Changes will be updated in near real-time, for Application Programming Interface (API) connections, or via ad hoc updates –and of course, you have the ability to publish updates yourself, if you so wish.

We also push data to Google and other large-scale search engines and directories multiple times per week. This helps them to recognize that your brand is actively managing its local presence. This also helps reduce listing inaccuracies and protects their trust in the quality of your brand’s data.

Mitigating ownership issues and duplicate listings

Duplicate listings and inaccuracies typically aren’t created intentionally but have negative implications. It’s important to monitor for these issues as they can negatively impact both rankings and customer experience, as well as eroding search engine trust in your brand. What’s more, brands may not realize these potentially damaging interactions are happening — the customer is simply lost and moves on.

We help mitigate this risk with constant monitoring and quick intervention, correcting outdated or inaccurate listings, and removing duplicates. We also help providers who practice at multiple locations create and manage listings for each one to maximize their online presence. 

GMB isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it channel; our research shows that actively managing local listings drives sizable increases in GMB engagements, views, and conversion actions such as requests for driving directions and clicks to call.

Monitoring search performance to identify new optimizations

We help businesses move quickly on new opportunities through constant performance monitoring (also in near real-time). Baseline and ongoing reporting showcase how a brand is performing across local search including:

• Listing accuracy
• Citation completeness
• Ranking in organic and local for branded and unbranded terms
• Multi-radius local ranking within Maps
• GMB metrics for clicks, views, searches, and reviews

This wealth of knowledge enables you to understand precisely where you stand in the market so that we can identify opportunities and prioritize our next steps together to reach your goals. 

Assessing algorithm, attributes, and feature updates

Key search engines and directories such as Google, Bing, Yelp, and more continually update their features and algorithms. They also release new attributes and updates that help connect users with relevant businesses. 

Take advantage of these by ensuring each of your locations utilizes the very best available features to match your specific business or service needs. These help your local listing to rank well and enable you to engage with your target audience. 

Google Posts has been an excellent addition to the Google My Business (GMB) platform. These help companies highlight new products, share offers, promote in-store events, and communicate essential updates, all while amplifying their brand’s presence.  

However, Google Posts are often underutilized and, in fact, can even be a real pain point. For instance, until recently, you could only use the API, designed to let brands build applications that interact directly with their business location information on the GMB server, with 12 locations or fewer. 

As your local marketing partner, Rio SEO can support you in creating and optimizing different types of posts to ensure their robustness and effectiveness, as well as create unique URLs for each of your locations to better track performance. In addition, user engagement levels can be increased through the use of features such as event or service booking buttons and additional URLs. For more best practices on this check out our whitepaper, Google Posts 101. 

Ongoing management of local presence 

Part of maintaining a healthy, local presence is responding quickly to changing consumer behavior and local conditions in every market. This is vital not just for boosting brand visibility but also for creating meaningful customer interactions that convert directly into sales. Your Account Director will provide recommendations based on these changes and shifts in the industry to ensure your brand never misses a key local update. 

Enhancing your local presence beyond local listings

Locator and Local Page experiences help move the needle in organic SEO, both of which are available additional solutions provided by Rio SEO. Reputation Management is simplified and made scalable with the ability to manage reviews within the same dashboard with Rio SEO’s Open Local Platform, ensuring your brand never misses an opportunity to engage with both happy and unsatisfied customers.

Not a Rio SEO customer but interested in optimizing your local presence? We can provide you with a free local audit to help you identify your areas for enhancement.