Difficulty Ranking Two Locations in the Same City

[misterfla]

We are in the self-storage business and have locations through the Pacific Northwest. As we grow, there are cities where we've added multiple (2-3) locations. But we're discovering that we're having a great deal of difficulty ranking for all of these. For instance, we have two locations in Vancouver, WA. One is West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver, and the other is West Coast Self-Storage Padden Parkway. Both are in Vancouver, WA, but for the most part, only West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver is getting ranked. In fact, on those searches where Vancouver ranks, Padden Parkway doesn't show up anywhere. Not in the top 10 pages anyway.

Each location has an outer landing page and an inner details page. On each page, we've placed unique, city-optimized keywords in the URL, Page Title, h1s, content. Of course each location has a separate NAP. Each location also has its own GMB page. Each location has a decent amount of reviews across multiple sites (Google, Yelp, GetFiveStars.)

Both locations were previously on their own domain until a year ago when they were redirected to their current URLs. Both of those original domains were close to the same age.

With the Padden Parkway location, we've tried to be even more hyper-local, by including the address in the URLs and in the h1 of the outer page. We've also created an h2 that references local neighborhoods around the business.

We're also running into this situation in at least one other city, so I'm wondering if this has something to do with our url structure. Other businesses in our space use the URL structure of domain.com/state/city/location. We only go down to the state level.

What are we missing?

[davebuts]

Hi Steven,

Is your goal to have Google rank both pages for searches like "self storage vancouver"?

Ranking two pages is going to be very difficult (but not impossible) to achieve and I would consider combining the locations into a single Vancouver self storage page. From there, users could see both locations and choose the one that's more convenient for them.

I'm not sure if you would have any issues with this - are they franchised businesses?

Cheers,

David

[misterfla]

Thanks for answering, David. Yes, our goal is to get both pages ranked for keyword phrases such as "self storage vancouver." We'd prefer to not just have a Vancouver landing page since we just manage many of our locations rather than own them. We've thought about the idea of having a Vancouver landing page with both locations listed and hyperlinked to their own location pages. This appears to be what a number of our competitors are doing. But we're are trying to avoid that if possible since that would require a complete overhaul of our site hierarchy with our other locations.

Any other ideas?

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

This is a tricky one.  Things I might consider are:

1. changing your link structure and the hierarchy of links and link equity flow throughout the page is no problem. So long as you use 301 redirects in the correct way and get things indexed in search console (there's a stricter limit on how many you can do in a day now but it's still a good 10-20 in my experience) then there will be no waiting around for the changes to take affect and rankings will not tank because of 301's like they used to.  The whole structure could be changed and reindexed inside a week.

2. Pages with the same copy near one another may still be competing unfortunately (the problem you're having) but it could also just be that the new pages are newer and haven't had the traffic and user data fed back to google yet so it's not ranking them highly.  Do a bulk DA check to find out.

3. I would certainly consider seriously looking at what your successful competitors are doing - if they are ranking then they have it the right way.  But don't blindly follow the competition without researching their pages and crawling them with tools like Screaming Frog to see the link structure visually.

4. "Self Storage Vancouver" as David said, should be your main page, at the top.  Then the local pages should all link to this page and they will make sure you're ranking for that term.  Then have the sub pages with their towns in the H1's, title and URL as you describe and mark t all up in Data Highlighter and make sure the GMB categories and locations are absolutely spot on with your NAP.  Like 100% identical. Use Moz Local for this.

5. The bounce rate on your main Self-Storage Vancouver page will be 0% because everyone will choose a city so this will really help with the UX signals - although google will know it's a sort of portal page.

Remember that google ranks 'entities' but it can take time for an entity to appear in local search, on the maps and on the SERP.  You'll be used to having things appear instantly with your main page with it's high DA, loads of traffic etc but when you open a new one you are still starting something new in google's eyes so you cannot expect the same results immediately.

Hope this helps.