Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Facebook Locations - Good or Bad for Local Rankings?
-
Our company has multiple (3) offices, including our headquarters, and each has its own Facebook page. Other than the primary company page, the other two locations have only been claimed and do not have posts, reviews, check-ins, etc.
Now, Facebook recently granted us access to Facebook Locations, which, if I understand correctly, would remove 2-out-of-3 office pages and add a "Locations" tab to our primary company page where people can see the other offices.
_See Starbucks Example: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Starbucks/locations/?ref=page_internal _
I've read mixed reviews regarding using the Locations feature, but nothing definitively answers whether or not this would negatively affect local rankings.
Does anyone have firsthand experience going from individual business pages to a single parent business page with Locations? Is there any trustworthy documentation out there about this?
-
Hi Johnny,
I'd like to be able to give you a 100% certain "yes" or "no" answer on this, but Facebook's lack of documentation always makes me say "I think", instead of "I know", for fear I've overlooked some hidden thing about their system I don't understand.
In this case, I "think" you should be fine so long as you are consistently designating the same location as the company headquarters so that its phone number and address are always the same across FB and the web.
But, you might want to ask here, in case you get a different opinion: https://www.facebook.com/help/community
-
Yes that is exactly correct. So I would have the same phone number for the brand page as well as one of the location pages.
-
Hi Johnny,
So, is what you're describing something along the lines of:
-
I have a multi-location business, and one location is the headquarters
-
I want to use the HQ's phone number on the brand page
Is that it? Please, let me know if I'm not quite following, and also, just to confirm, you are talking about Facebook, yes?
-
-
Thank you for this information. I am implementing locations for several clients as well. One question I have regards phone numbers. Can I use the same phone number for the brand as I use for one of the locations? When I do, Moz shows this as a duplicate. However, there is not another phone number to use, and I hate to omit the phone number on the brand page, as sometimes that is the page people find first. What have you done in that situation?
-
Hi Jen,
Thank you for the great insight! Also, thank you for clarifying (in another forum) that "Locations does not consolidate all of your pages into one page. It just knits them all together ... and you still have local Facebook pages."
I can see that Facebook Locations has a lot of benefits and it appears to have worked well for your clients. However, you mentioned that moving to the parent-child structure means the primary corporate page would no longer have an address or reviews.
While I understand Facebook's logic for having location-specific reviews, especially for retail stores and restaurants, I'm not sure how well it would work for a medium-size B2B business with only a three locations (two of which are manufacturing facilities).
The questions that come to mind are:
- If we were to switch to the parent-child framework and lose the reviews on the primary page, where do they go?
- We'd also lose the address, so would we need to create a new Facebook Business Page to replace that location?
- Currently, when you Google search the company name, the primary location page appears in the Knowledge Panel with Facebook reviews. If we switched, I'm assuming the Knowledge Panel would still show an address (since it's probably through Google My Business) but no more Facebook reviews. Is that right?
- We only have three locations - a headquarters and two other "offices", which are really manufacturing facilities / warehouses. We aren't really looking to acquire reviews for those manufacturing sites nor would we expect our B2B clients to be reviewing them. Does Facebook Locations still make sense for us?
I apologize for all the questions. Still just trying to wrap my head around all of this!
- Mike
-
Jen, thank you so much for contributing your findings to this thread. I'm so happy you have a resource you've linked to. Fantastic!
-
Hey Mike,
I've implemented Facebook Locations for a lot of clients. A clarification: the Locations structure doesn't change the number of Facebook pages you have or remove any existing local ones. It just allows all of them to be visible on a locations map on your main page. You still have a local Facebook page for each of your stores/locations.
In our experience, our local rankings have gone up (though that could be from a number of factors, not just Facebook). But the fact that each Facebook page in the Locations framework is called "Brand Name (city name)" makes it easier for local Facebook pages to be found in local search. Also, local Facebook pages have store-specific reviews on them, and Google is now bringing FB reviews into search results.
Here's some more info we've written about it:
https://www.reshiftmedia.com/facebook-parent-child-framework-what-it-is-and-practical-applications-for-franchisors-and-multi-location-businesses/https://www.reshiftmedia.com/facebook-locations-updated-with-name-reviews-changes/
Good luck!
Jen @ Reshift Media -
Good luck, Mike, and that would be great if you would share anything you learn with our community. Thank you!
-
Hi Miriam,
Thank you for taking the time to research this! I agree that this does appear to be uncharted waters since no one seems to answer the question directly. I'll take your suggestion and post in the Facebook help community and update this thread if I get anything of value. Crossing my fingers that someone else in the Mozverse can help!
-
Hey Mike,
I have been looking into your excellent question a bit for the last two days, and while there are good tutorials out there about implementing Facebook Locations (like this one: https://sweetiq.com/blog/how-to-claim-facebook-locations/), what I'm not finding is trustworthy documentation of downsides, and I have one concern about this.
One of my colleagues and I noticed that Facebook's API is not seeming to return the locations of businesses using Facebook Locations, unless you add a city name to your query. This seems a bit odd and I don't know what to make of it, and don't have the resources of time at the moment to explore whether this behavior of Facebook's API could have further-reaching effects on search. For example, does this mean that apps/directories that pull from this API aren't going to return your multi-locations in their results? How does this impact Google results? Etc., etc.
I think you've raised a question that deserves a full study, and I'm sorry not to be able to surface one for you. I think you may have surfaced something that's in uncharted waters, and I'd love to see an enterprising Local SEO explore this topic further. In the meantime, you might consider posting in Facebook's help community to see if you can get any anecdotal replies from businesses who are implementing Facebook Locations, to see if they've noted any peculiar or negative impacts of going that route instead of going with individually building out pages one-at-a-time.
-
Hi Mike,
Yes I do have experience with that as our company has also several branches.
What you should do, probably in this order and that is in my opinion by far more important is the following:
- clean up your local citations (company, name, address, phone no, etc.) and use them consistently everywhere
- add each of your branches to Google My Business (GMB, thats a strong signal to Google)
- add JSON LD schema markup to your page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/local-businesses (you can do that also for different branches
More information on the topic you can find in this new section: https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/learn/seo/local
I didn't know of the Facebook Local thing honestly. Not sure if there is a clear mapping of a business with the according address/cities. I checked the source code of your Starbuck example. Facebook also uses JSON LD (schema markup) so they might do exactly what I suggest in point 3 for their Local Businesses (not completely sure but I don't have time to check that in depth...) in the background.
With point 1 + 2 you should already achieve a lot, point 3 is nice to have.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Cesare
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to add multiple locations to an existing GBP
Hi, I'm having trouble finding the option to add multiple locations to an existing GBP account. Can somebody help me?
Local Listings | | Trendi
I believe it can be done throught Google &/or MOZ.
Thank you,0 -
How do I treat multiple buildings on the same college campus on Google for local SEO?
Should I delete them? Simply give them a different address like "City, State, Zip"? I see the benefit of having key buildings on campus in Google Maps, but I don't want those to affect my accuracy score and, thus, my local rankings for SEO.
Local Listings | | GabeGibitz1 -
Local SEO Tasks When Closing One Branch of Multilocation Business
I would appreciate the opinions of my fellow SEOs on this one. I haven’t seen any other threads on this exact subject and others that touch on it are somewhat older so I am hoping this also proves to be a good resource for others going forward. I have an existing client that I did local SEO for about a year ago. They are a propane service provider and they had multiple locations. So we did local SEO for the company primarily by updating NAPs and creating more individual content for each of the branches such as specific landing page for each branch on their website and individual listings in citations for each branch. Now they have sold one of the branches to a competitor and they need to remove all listings for it. I am trying to develop a comprehensive list of actions to take and I would appreciate any feedback on the best way to go about accomplishing this task. Here is what I have so far: Remove all mention of sold branch on client website, including specific landing page Delete any branch-specific social media accounts Some specific areas I have questions about are: What do I do with Google My Business listings for the sold branch? Do I try to delete/unregister/close them? Or should I just leave them be with an updated link to our website homepage? Should I even bother contacting the main NAP listing sites to remove the old listing or just leave it to fall off on its own? Thank you again for all your help!
Local Listings | | Ayres-SEO0 -
For Google's Structured Data, should I change my listings from Product schema to Local Business schema?
I was reading Google's Structured Data spec, and I'm considering changing the schema of our listing pages from the Product schema to the Local Business schema. Is this a good idea? To give you a little more info, the pages that I'm classifying are listings for physical spaces that our website rents out for activities, such as meetings. Here's an example of a listing: https://www.peerspace.com/pages/listings/550ddcde2f352d0800fc186b Our goal is to add the proper schema.org tags to the page so that our spaces show up in local searches, such as "meeting space in San Francisco." The problem is that when we add location microdata (addressLocality, addressRegion, etc.) to our current "Product" schema, Google tells us that "Products" can't have a location. However, we aren't quite a "Local Business" either, since we don't publicly share our space's street addresses—only the space's neighborhood/city/state for privacy reasons. As a result, we get an error from Google's Structured Data Tool as a "Local Business" page because "streetAddress" is required for Local Businesses. Should we switch to the Local Business schema anyway, even though we get structured data errors for streetAddress? Or is it better not to include the location information in the microdata so that we don't have errors? Does Google penalize you for incomplete tags? Any input is appreciated!
Local Listings | | stuartstein0 -
Best Practice When Selling One Location of Company with Multiple Branches - Local Search
I have a client with a small business with 4 different branches. Currently, we have a main landing page for the company, plus distinct landing pages for each branch with maps, territories, distinct phone numbers, etc., for each branch. The company recently sold one of the branches to a competitor as they do not want to service that area anymore. They have asked me what they should do now. Obviously, we are going to remove the location page for that branch, but we also need to transfer the phone number to the other company for use as part of the sale. What tasks should I look into for separating the branch from the rest of the company while still maintaining best practice for the rest of the site/company? Thank you for your help and suggestions.
Local Listings | | Ayres-SEO0 -
Best Local Citation Building Services
Hi, have any of you ever used a local citation building service? Are some better than others, any recommendations? Any bad experiences or companies to avoid? I'm fairly new to the process and it looks like there's a lot of snake oil salesmen in this vertical, so any and all insight you could give me would be great! Thank you in advance, I look forward to hearing feedback from all of you!
Local Listings | | maxcarnage0 -
Is there a way to get your local SERP by zipcode?
I have multiple stores across various zipcodes and i'm having difficulty trying to provide an average Positioning on SERP by region. I do know that your SERP varies by region because different areas use different vernaculars. Does anyone know of a way that I can provide a SERP for keywords/terms by county or zip code?
Local Listings | | rpaiva0 -
Does anyone use Moz Local + Yext? How valuable is this for local businesses?
For brands that have a budget to pay $600 / year for valuable backlink directories, would you recommend Moz Local + Yext? I would like to hear some feedback on marketers that use Yext. Thanks,
Local Listings | | ColeLusby
Cole0