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://moz.com/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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Adding Multiple Country Locations for Google Business Listings
Hi Moz community, I hope everyone is well. I would like to ask for your advice on how to show a Google Business listing in both the UK and US for our brand. I understand that you can add multiple locations to your Google listing under the 'Manage Locations' tab but I wasn't quite sure how it worked in practice. I have a couple of questions below: If we have 2 registered locations/offices (one in the UK and one in the US) are we able to create 2 separate locations that will show our business listing correctly in the right-hand margin when people search for our brand in the US and UK respectively? If so, when a user finds our business listing in the US, are we able to serve them our US website version when they click the 'Website' button, as opposed to showing them our UK website? Our US website has been created as a sub-directory from our main UK site and can be seen as: www.example.com/us/ I hope someone is able to help, and thank you in advance.
Local Listings | | Katarina-Borovska
Katarina0 -
Is having two websites with the same NAP equal to the local search visibility issues?
My company works in two directions: printing and website design / development. I have one website for both printing and website development but it doesn’t have “printing” in domain name (velvdesign.com) I would like to rank higher for printing related keywords. Do you think I should have two separate websites, one for printing (velvprinting.com), another for website design /development (velvdesign.com)? If yes, am I going to get into NAP’s issue because my company has only one location? I can get the second phone number to improve local search visibility. Thank you very much in advance for your time!
Local Listings | | VELV0 -
Which Rank Trackers Include Local 3-pack Rankings?
Granted the Local 3-pack is heavily influenced by the distance between the user and the business, when you actually include the city name in the search, the local 3 pack result doesn't center the map at the city in the search and not the user's location so it is much more consistent despite the searcher's location. So my personal opinion is that it is worth tracking local 3-pack when you use a keyword such as "Home Inspection Seattle Wa" With that said, which rank tracking services includes the local 3-pack in their tracking results, other than of course Bright Local?
Local Listings | | JCCMoz0 -
Consistant citations for Local SEO
Hi Guys - Ive got a tricky question. I want to create correct and consistent citations for this business http://www.singlewellcarsales.co.uk/ However theres a twist, the website is called ‘Singlewell Car Sales Ltd’ but they also have a service centre called ‘Singlewell Service Centre Ltd’ so in theory two business names under one website. We want to treat them as two separate businesses when adding to local directories. We also want to create two local Google pages. Both divisions share the same website, and address but include a different telephone number and business name. I want to use Schema mark up on the website to reference both business names so that Google can make a link between the name and various local citations NAP. My main questions is, can you use Schema two mark up two business names under one website? or will Google get confused and regard it as duplicate or inconsistent citations? Many Thanks Jon Rayner
Local Listings | | NaughtyChilli0 -
Pictures on Google Local not ours
Hi all- We recently had some pictures show up on our local profile that are not our store. When you click on them they have links to someone's blog as well. Can someone tell me how these got here and more importantly how to get rid of them. We've looked everywhere but can't find them to get rid of. Thanks for any help! Ken
Local Listings | | CandymanKen0 -
Deciding whether to list multiple locations
Hey Mozzers, thanks for your awesome help today. I have another related question to local listings. We're currently rebuilding our website and we have multiple physical locations across the UK. Is it beneficial SEO wise for us to display just one address on our contact page or should we list the 5 addresses that we have? I have also been checking out our local listings and it appears that we have inconsistent listings across the 13 sites that Moz local lists in the UK and then across various other directories. How important is it to get these cleaned up? Cheers in advance Leo
Local Listings | | Leo_Woodhead0 -
How does dynamic call tracking affect local SEO?
I would like to begin tracking calls and offline conversions, but I am concerned that if I add a dynamic call tracking software that it will negatively affect SEO.
Local Listings | | FluidAdvertising1 -
Local Subdomain vs. Local Subfolder
I know this is an issue that's been discussed here ad nauseum but I have, possibly, an interesting case. A third party company created our local search pages, and they perform very highly in SERPs, but are subdomains (local.website.com). But my problem comes down to two things, one of which isn't necessarily a subdomain vs. subfolder issue. 1.a. With the subdomain local.website.com we rank much higher for local search than we do for regular search on our main domain and it's respective keywords, would changing these subdomains to subfolders keep the link juice that the subdomain currently possesses and actually help our website rankings? b. And what strikes me as the most puzzling is that on local.website.com ALL of the content is identical (I can thank Copyscape for that) to the other local search pages on our own site and various other sites in our industry. I know the duplicate content is hurting our domain, which makes it even more confusing that our subdomain is ranking so highly for things like "diamonds by the yard florida". 2. We're an online only company, and I feel as though gaming the local search function isn't exactly something we should be doing, both from an ethical and an SEO standpoint. Is there any evidence that abusing the local search functions can have a negative affect on a domain's rankings? Hopefully this makes sense, if anyone needs clarification please let me know and I'll endlessly clarify. Thanks,
Local Listings | | allurez0