Correct setup: One business, one website, two bricks and mortar locations

[Bee159]

Hi all, we have a furniture business with two physical stores and one website, which has the ability to sell online but we hardly sell anything but we're just about to start Google PLA on a few products, let's say our website is at:

nicefurniture.co.uk

We have nicefurniture.co.uk/first-location and nicefurniture.co.uk/second-location set up with all the store info, a Google Map, contact info, etc. This is linked to from the footer on all pages.

Issue 1:

I have been told conflicting things about how to best set up our Google My Business page. One person says set the URL for both to our homepage, nicefurniture.co.uk and the other says point each GMB listing to the store location pages OR we should buy www.furniture-first-location.co.uk as our URL and point the GMB listing to that. To me, that doesn't make sense as we'd be spreading our domain equity with a new domain, surely?

Issue 2:

How do I get each GMB location to show up in Maps, etc when people search for 'furniture location' or even 'sofa location' or 'dining table location'? Would I need to optimize the store pages on our site?

Issue 3:

Years ago we did set up another URL, let's say nicefurniture-cornwall.co.uk and on it there are about 500 pages, all with links pointing to our main website. Google Search Console for our main website lists this other website as one of our top linking domains. Does that mean if we remove nicefurniture-cornwall.co.uk we'll risk a drop in rankings?

Many thanks for your input.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

Hope these answers help:

1. Yes, create a landing page on your website for each of the 2 stores and link all of your citations (including your GMB listing) to the correct respective landing page.

2. There are several hundred factors that contribute to local rankings. You'll want to study:

https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

and

https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist

3. I'd like to ask some of the traditional SEO experts in our community to weigh in on this one, but technically, if you only have one business, you should only be representing it with a single website.