Is a Location Page or Home Page Better for Your GBP URL?
Here’s a question about local SEO that I recently received.
The question was about what is the best pages to use from your website as the Website link in Google Business Profile, when you have multiple locations.
This operates under the presumption that you have two or more locations, and each location has it’s own Google My Business listing, with separate addresses and reviews.
This is what it looks like when you select a website URL in Google Business Profile.
Here’s the original question.
“If a business has several locations setup in Google My Business, should each location link to a website’s homepage or location page for that city? I watched a video from MOZ on how the local algorithm works. They experimented with this by linking Google Business Profile location pages to the homepage rather than the location page and saw a positive impact in the search results. Wondering why this might be and if it’s worth trying.”
The Definitive Answer
If your location pages are strong landing pages, and have a lot of information about what you do (like a home page does) then it’s probably worth linking to those as your Google Business Profile URL. If you have a basic location page (map, hours, address, phone) and not much else, I would link to the home page instead.
The Google ranking algorithm selects all possible pages that might fit a query that are in collection of indexed pages.
So if the city and service are both mentioned on the location page and the home page, both those pages are considered for fitting that query, and can be ranked.
How to Choose Which to Use as the Website URL for a Google Business Profile Location?
A big clue is which page is already ranking higher for that local query.
In most cases, if a city landing page and the home page from one site are both considered, the home page is usually the one Google chooses to rank highest. That’s usually the case if the location page for that city is less robust than the home page.
A lot will depend on the content of the two pages. Does the title tag and H1 on both the home page and location page include "[service] + [city]"? What does the content look like on each page? Usually the home page has more information.
Another big factor is how many external sites are linking to each page. The home page usually has more inbound links than an inner page on a website, so the home page is usually ranked higher by default.
Google can also choose to rank both the home page and a location in the top 20 organic results if there is low competition for that keyword phrase.
Over time, Google will usually adjust to favor one or the other (home page or city landing page) in the Search Engine Results Pages.
Hey John Locke,
Great Article! Your blogs always surprise me, once again I got lots of useful information.
Thank you for sharing this.
Thanks & Regards
I appreciate the kind words, Nityen. I wish you much success.
– John
I question what city the landing page should be optimized for if a business address is located say 20 minutes from the city they target. Often there is a “greater city area” that covers all the suburbs. Should their landing page be optimized for the suburb they reside in or is it ok to target the “greater city area”? For example, If my home page currently ranks for Dallas plumber but my business address is 20 minutes from Dallas, is it OK to link my GMB to the home page or should it link to a town page that the business is actually located in? They may have a city page for their town but it has far less page rank than the home page. We want the GMB to rank for everything between the town and the big city “ideally”.
Hi David:
I would use either the home page or the city landing page, whichever is ranking higher right now. More than likely this will be the home page. I’m operating under the assumption you only have the one location.
Your GMB isn’t going to ranking in the top 3 in Google Maps for every neighborhood in a big metro area like Dallas, unless you have multiple locations in different locations. Think of Google Maps as a driving app, and it is giving directions to each user. Google Maps is going to prioritize businesses that are nearby the current user’s device. So that’s why it’s difficult to always rank at the top in the map in larger cities.
Your best bet would be to create city pages for each of the neighborhoods in which you want to target customers. At least you will get some organic traffic through these.
~ John Locke