Recently I had a question that went something like this; we’ve added a new location to our business and want to update my website. Should I create a new website or edit my existing site?
When faced with this fortunate situation, adding a new website is more work and simply a bad choice. Why is it a bad choice? Well for starters, there is a lot of work that goes into a new website. One major reason is that you’ll have to hire a developer to manage the change in page urls so the Search Engines recover nicely from all the missing webpages. They’ll penalize you for the 404 missing page error and so there’s considerable work just creating the 301 moved page workaround. A second reason, websites are a lot of work and can consume a lot of your time and money. Unless you’re really itching for a new site regardless of this situation, there is a better way.
Lots of large companies manage their multiple locations with one website. They add locations, close locations and simply update their locations list. You should either edit your location page or create it if you don’t have one. There you should list the locations for your business. This is also a prime opportunity to add some simple Schema.org markup to your page.
First you want to declare that the content in this locations page is about a HomeandConstruction Business and wrap your company name and a self-referencing link to your website. Then for each location in your list, wrap the address in the Schema.org/PostalAddress type. This will unambigiously tell Google, Yahoo and Bing that your business name has those specific addresses. If you have a different phone number for the location, you can include that in the Postal Address.
For example:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/HomeAndConstructionBusiness">
<span itemprop="name">Carters Contracting</span>
<a itemprop="url" href="http://www.cartersfakecontracting.com">www.caretersfakecontracting.com</a>
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">1901 Lemur Ave</span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Sunnyvale</span>,
<span itemprop="addressRegion">CA</span> <span itemprop="postalCode">94086</span>
<span itemprop="telephone">(408) 714-1489</span>
</div>
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">1901 Lemur Ave</span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Sunnyvale</span>,
<span itemprop="addressRegion">CA</span>
<span itemprop="postalCode">94086</span>
<span itemprop="telephone">(408) 714-1489</span>
</div>
</div>
A second thing you should do is to register the location(s) with Google Places for Business. Go to http://www.google.com/local/business/ and register your locations. This unambiguously informs Google’s services about your business, and you can easily manage multiple locations. Get this right and you’ll nearly solve majority of issues of location with Google.
