Facebook Locations - Good or Bad for Local Rankings?

[MPlata]

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?

[Cesare.Marchetti]

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:

1. clean up your local citations (company, name, address, phone no, etc.) and use them consistently everywhere
2. add each of your branches to Google My Business (GMB, thats a strong signal to Google)
3. 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

[MiriamEllis]

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.

[MPlata]

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!

[MiriamEllis]

Good luck, Mike, and that would be great if you would share anything you learn with our community. Thank you!

[Carlysteven]

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

[MiriamEllis]

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!

[MPlata]

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:

1. If we were to switch to the parent-child framework and lose the reviews on the primary page, where do they go?
2. We'd also lose the address, so would we need to create a new Facebook Business Page to replace that location?
3. 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?
4. 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

[JohnnyWyattJ3]

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?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Johnny,

So, is what you're describing something along the lines of:

1. I have a multi-location business, and one location is the headquarters

2. 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?

[JohnnyWyattJ3]

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.

[MiriamEllis]

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