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
-
Call forwarding phone number from a satellite location?
Should I be cautious about using a local number that is forwarded on to my main office? I have 2 "satellite" offices. 1 has an actual phone number and line that is active at the location, and the other has a "local" number that is forwarded. The location with the actual phone number and line that is active at the location is performing much better, and I am trying to isolate the cause. Ben
Local Listings | | BSessions0 -
Removing a duplicate local listing in same city
Hello, I see three locations for a client. Two legitimate which I have ownership of, the third is a duplicate of one of the locations. Ithink it is harming rankings and I want to get rid of it. It is service area business. Things keep changing, but how will I remove it? My client obviously set this up a while ago and it is left with wrong or missing info. When I click on the business under "more listings" on maps there is a chance to "edit it" AND "claim it" but not delete it. When I strart to claim it I go through adding in everything but then I worry I am legitimising the duplicate. How do you get rid of it? Thanks
Local Listings | | AL123al0 -
Hotel SEO / Rank Conundrum
Hello Mozzers, I am having an issue with a particular client and wanted to throw it out to the forum for feedback. We work with many resorts and hotels. One, in particular, is a large condo-hotel property with several individual buildings. Each building has a unique name. While the property management company owns and operates most of the units within each building, there are units that are individually owned. The property management company runs the branded resort website, all local pages & listings, etc. One savvy unit owner, however, has built a website that is branded with the individual building name for one of the buildings. He has also taken ownership of the building Google Plus page, Facebook page, etc. He only owns a handful of units in the building. We have retroactively tried creating a new site but are struggling to gain traction from a ranking perspective. We did temporarily change the website address that was listed for the Google local listing, via the "edit" button, and were actually starting to increase rank (presumably somewhat related to the increase in website traffic), but it was quickly fixed to the other website. The management company has reached out to the owner but he continues to refuse to give up any rights to the Google local page, etc. We have also created a new (technically duplicate) page just to see if we can knock the other one off, though we are having issues getting the verification post card from Google. Any advice on how we can gain access to this Google local page? Or any other tips on how to get a relatively small, new site to overtake an existing site? I know URLs / examples are helpful in these situations but we'd prefer to keep the client names anon.
Local Listings | | mbochic0 -
Google Local Listing Ranking/Traffic Metrics in the Google Search Console?
A client of mine asked me if it was possible to see local listing data (ranking/traffic stats) in the Google Search Console for a URL. I figured the Google Search Console only shows organic metrics not 3-pack/local listing performance. However I could be mistaken. Does the Google Search Console report this?
Local Listings | | RosemaryB0 -
Is the new local 3-pack the death of Google+ as factor?
So now we have the new 3-pack local results, which obviously cut the listings Google+ link from the results. What I find strange is that is now even when searching the business name alone, there is no sign of the associated Google+ page in the results. I still get other local third party listings like Facebook, Yellowpages, and Yelp – but no link anywhere for the Google+ page. I noticed this today when I wanted to verify something on a client’s page. There was nothing I could do search wise to bring up this business Google+ page. I finally got it by clicking the link through Moz local. After exploring this with some other clients, when I do get a Google+ page in the search results some have produced a 500 error when clicked on. If Google wasn’t killing off Google+, why would they completely omit the pages from their own search results? Another extremely strange thing, the majority of my clients are independent local businesses inside a large national company. Their Google+ listings have always been managed corporately using a bulk listing feed. We could never gain access to these pages and would always manage our listings to match that of the corp. controlled page. Well the last week of July they announced they were giving us the option to take control of the page. This happened with two different companies, MAJOR national competitors in the same industry, within a couple days of each other. They now treat it just like another version of social media, instead of a major factor within search. I find it hard to believe that something isn’t going on…
Local Listings | | masonrj0 -
Question about tools for closing a location and erasing it from existence.
I have a client that is a bank that is closing a location. I have worked with moves, but not full closes. Is there an easy tool or method in Moz Local to close a location everywhere?
Local Listings | | jeremyskillings0 -
How do we setup renting space without hurting our local seo?
Currently, one of our offices has two businesses in it that our owned by the same person. The law firm and the title company. They both use the same address, but they both rank locally for this area. I'm worried that having another company rent space here that is not affiliated with the owner AND is using the same address will hurt us. What are our options here? The best thing I can think to do is have them add a suite number or something to their listing, but I'm not sure exactly how to do that. Do I need to get the post office is to verify that? Will google and the rest just overturn it, if it's not in their records? Anyone know how best to proceed with this? Thanks, Ruben
Local Listings | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Completely lost Google Local rankings for main keywords
Hi there, Our website, petmedicalcenter.com, used to rank very well in Google in the local section - usually within the top 3 spots for 8 or so keywords. Then last fall our rankings started to diminish. We would rank really well for a few days and then would be no where to be found in the local section - this cycle kept going for a few months. Now, within the last few weeks our website is nowhere to be found in local for our usual keywords. After a few years of success with SEO, I know the landscape is really starting to change. My problem is that I don't even know where to start to try and get us back on to the top spots. I know this question is rather broad, but I am really at a loss here. Any help is greatly appreciated!! http://www.petmedicalcenter.com Main Keywords: veterinarian las vegas, vets in las vegas, veterinarians las vegas, las vegas veterinarians, vet las vegas Thank you for your help! Brant
Local Listings | | BCB11210