Enterprise Local SEO Challenges & How to Overcome Them 

Intro

Enterprise brands face a unique problem when it comes to effective SEO strategies. Their SEO strategy is often tailored to the whole country. This leaves many local revenue streams untapped. 

Shifting the focus to local SEO for enterprises paves the way for a better national strategy. 

Targeting local customers is a sure way to boost your online visibility and sales. 

7 Enterprise Local SEO Challenges & How to Overcome Them 

 1. Factoring in Multiple Locations

It's common for large sales and marketing teams to ignore local SEO. It happens when their focus is more on capturing the market on a national or regional level. 

While this is an ambitious approach, it leaves many gaps in your SEO strategy that your competitors may be leveraging to get more customers. Shifting priority to local SEO can be a game-changer. There are many ways to do it. Some may be more effective than others.

Here are a few to get you started:

• Identify your top product categories and check if any specific cities or regions show more traction for these than others. This is an excellent way to determine which local markets need more SEO focus.
• Pick a small set of test locations and deploy teams and resources there. Implement local SEO best practices and measure them over a few weeks.
• Keep track of how your competitors are approaching multi-location SEO. 

You can keep track of your competitor’s SEO efforts using ahrefs:

Read: Important Tips to do Local SEO for Multiple locations

2. De-centralized Listings Management

It is messy if all the location and address data for your chain of stores are not centrally maintained. Data about your stores must have a single source. Not having it could lead to incorrect details published online. This hurts SEO and deters customers from trusting your listings online. 

Thankfully this can be easily averted. Signing up with a trusted listing management company unifies all your company data.

It can be bewildering to pick the right listing management firm. Fret not as we round up our top-3 listing management companies for you:

• Moz Local: Moz Local is one of the most popular companies for local SEO visibility. They have a full-fledged set of tools and software to boost local reach. 
• Bright Local: Helps you manage all your local SEO efforts in one place. Get data about your local SEO efforts for multiple locations. 
• Yext: Take control of multi-location listings and quickly reach the right local audience. 

You can also use SEMRush to manage multiple listings:

3. Delayed Content Deployment

Companies spend without a thought on branding and marketing but overlook the power of content. Statistics show that quality content can even overcome poor site design issues. 

A big problem that often crops up is that content is neglected. Consider a case where you have stores in many countries. 

People from other locales will expect your web pages in the local language. A big SEO mistake is that this content is not there, or there are delays in deployment. This could cause you to lose SEO ranks and give other players a lead on you.

Here is what you can do to avert it:

• Create a robust content strategy. Have timelines for every content-specific task.
• Automate content publishing when possible. This will prevent any major content misses.
• Keep tabs on the type of content published by your competitors to give you fresh ideas.

You can use Buffer to schedule social media posts:

4. Google My Business Optimization

Google My Business (GMB) is one of the most popular platforms to list your website. It's like yellow pages for the web. GMB is free and, when optimized, can be a powerful tool. 

Sadly, many enterprise bands get it all wrong with GMB. They neglect optimizing individual locations and creating separate pages for each store. 

Although time-consuming, this effort pays off great dividends. It amplifies your store reach and visibility locally. It makes your business appear in local maps and 3-pack listings. 

When you optimize your brand for SEO, keep these factors in mind to ace your local SEO game:

• Check if all your listings carry accurate and consistent information about your stores. Inconsistency hurts local SEO.
• Audit and weed out any duplicate GMB listings. Someone in the company may have accidentally created a duplicate. 
• Keep tabs on how people engage with your GML listings and related posts. 

Here’s an example of duplicate GMB listings:

Read: Step-by-step Setup Guide for Google My Business Set up

5. Lack of Content in Local Languages

Quality content in local languages is powerful. They reach more people. It also convinces them that your brand has local interests at heart. A localization strategy for enterprise brands is a must. It sets you apart from other companies and boosts your local SEO efforts.

Using local keywords in the proper context and naturally is a great way to feature in the local 3-pack search results. Localization strategies vary based on need and budget, but here are a few things you should look at:

• Hire a pro agency to do the translations. Find someone who has experience with SEO and local keywords.
• Use translated keywords naturally. Don't stuff keywords, as this looks out of context and unnatural.
• Avoid using tools like Google translate for localization; it can be a disaster. Have a person do it for you, even if it costs a little more. 

You can hire freelance translators from Fiverr:

6. Poor Site Design and Architecture

Designing a website that is easy to navigate and follows SEO best practices can be tricky. It is especially so when dealing with multiple locations ranging from a few to hundreds. 

Content design and information architecture (IA) are keys to solving this problem. The different elements on your home page and landing pages are crucial for local SEO. In the past, companies would simply create separate pages for each new location to boost local SEO. 

Off late, Google sees this as a negative tactic. 

To overcome this hurdle, you can instead create main landing pages only for locations with maximum business. For example, if you have a store in central London and one outside London, you may want to focus on creating a landing page for the London store first. 

You can use blogs to optimize for other locations. Using these methods, you stay on top of Google's search algorithm. 

You can use SEO Site Checkup for auditing your website:

7. Unoptimized Store Locators 

Store locators on your site are great for customers. They give them specific information about stores at a location. Customers can find the map, timings, phone numbers, etc. A well-designed store locator can be an asset for local SEO. 

You can follow many best practices to build a store locator that helps visitors and ticks off all the right boxes for your local SEO strategy. 

We share some of them here:

• Create a simple drop-down menu from which a visitor can select the location. You can further distill the menu by country or state to make it easier. 
• Avoid forcing visitors to use the search feature to find a store. It is not effective and does nothing for your local SEO.
• Add content to store landing pages and not just location details. Additional information like special promos or events at the location is great for local SEO.

Here’s an example of a store locator:

Key Takeaways

• Optimize your Google My Business profile for local SEO. Search and remove any duplicate GMB listings on the web.
• Include supportive content on the location page and location and contact information.
• Localize landing page content. Avoid using Google Translate for it. Hire a professional.
• Test your strategy in multiple locations and markets. Focus on markets where business opportunities are more.
• Maintain a single data source for all your company and store information. Ensure that control of this is restricted. All data used anywhere about your stores must come from this single data source.
• Improve your store locator by including a drop-down menu and additional store information per location.