How to know when to keep or close an individual "branch location" website?
 by Kristi Hagen

How to know when to keep or close an individual "branch location" website?

  • I have two branch office locations in a big city, one downtown and the other suburban. I also have another main office located in a different major city. Both cities, and obviously all three locations, are in the state of Ohio.

    I'm considering shutting down the websites for my separate branch-locations, especially the downtown location website, replacing them by adding location pages to my main website which happens to be ranking well. I should also add that each of my two branch locations has a GMB (Google My Business) page.

    It seems that very few of my target market is in the downtown location area. Most of my target clients are in the city's suburban branch area which is only 10 miles away from downtown. I'd estimate that most of my target market is within 6 or 7 miles of the suburban branch.

    Ultimately I am looking for a way to focus my time and resources on the highest-producing location(s) while reducing the efforts being focused on the location(s) that are underperforming. However, I am struggling with figuring out exactly how to accurately assess their performance.

    I'm leaning toward maintaining the webpage for the suburban location and I'd like your opinion on whether or not I should eliminate the downtown branch GMB page. Do you have any advice on tools and/or procedures that will help me determine exactly what's my best option?

Answer:

For starters we'd recommend using this free Local Search Results Checker tool to emulate searches for your best terms from different areas of the city. To drill down into very specific local searches you can add zip codes to city + state to get hyper-localized results.

Search for common variations of your target search terms — both with and without geo-modifiers — search-terms + near me, in+location, near+location, etc.

If the downtown office ranks for any of the variations, we'd recommend that you consider search volume and importance to the business of those terms in deciding whether to keep the downtown office or not.

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