Citation Building et Backlinking: 4 offices with different adresses in different city

[H.M.N.]

Hi there,

We work with a client that has 4 offices with different addresses in 3 different cities. Each of them has a different google my business location.

I was wondering what would be the best way to build the citations for them, especially if the website has a ''dofollow'' link.

• Would it be better to build one citation for each locations? That would mean 4 citations from each website.
• If so, wouldn't google find it suspicious that a backlink comes 4 times from the same domain?
• OR, would the best be to build only one citation from one selected offices?
• Other?

Thank you in advance for your response,

[MiriamEllis]

Hi H.M.N!

Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. So, what you'll be doing is to build a complete set of both structured and unstructured citations/linktations for each of your public-facing offices. For each location you will:

1. Have a page on your website featuring excellent, unique content

2. Create, claim and manage a Google My Business listing

3. Create and manage structured citations on the major data aggregators and directories (Acxiom, Yelp, Infogroup, YP, etc.)

4. Create and manage structured citations on any further directories that are specific to your industry or geography (like Avvo for lawyers or Healthgrades for doctors)

5. Seek out unstructured citation/linktation opportunities on platforms like news sites, blogs, local business associations, event sites, etc. to grow the authority of each location

You'll go through this process for each of your locations.

As far your structured citations go (the ones on platforms like YP, Yelp, etc.) there is no cause for concern about listing multiple locations. Whole Foods Market must have hundreds of Yelp listings, after all, and there is no reason to worry that Google might find this suspicious.

As far as your unstructured citations/linktations go, these you will need to handle more singly. What might this look like? Let's say your business is a legal firm in the San Francisco Bay Area with 4 locations. Your office in Oakland could sponsor something like a Know Your Rights Camp event in Oakland. Your office in Berkeley could create a scholarship for law students at UC Berkeley. You have 2 offices in San Rafael. One could be cited in a news article in the Marin IJ online newspaper and another could join the local chamber of commerce. Etc, etc.

So, the difference for a multi-location model like yours would be that your structured citations for all locations can all be easily created on the same set of local business listing platforms, but that your unstructured citation/linktation development program will require more creativity and greater uniqueness. A single article in a newspaper is unlikely to cite and link to all 4 of your offices, right?

All of the above represents quite a bit of work, of course. Multi-locations typically need to automate part of this process. I highly recommend that, if you're a Moz Pro customer, you explore the Link Intersect tool to help you with the research for linktation opportunities, and if you have signed up for Moz Local, it will take care of many of your most important structured citations.

Hope this helps!