This article holds a summary of topics to consider, when focused on SEO and Locator + Pages.

We do see SEO as a mosaic of lots of pieces, which put together in a certain way and combination, will help your Locator's visibility.

Boost Performance and SEO for Locator + Pages

The following guide will explain all the needed and possible steps to set up Locator + Pages in a way that search engines will find it and index its pages. The article focuses on Google as a search engine, as it is the most commonly used platform and other platforms use Google's data as a reference.

Widget placement and performance

We explain the "How to implement the Locator + Pages widget" here.

It's recommended to embed the Locator + Pages widget on a dedicated page, with as little other content published as possible.
Meaning, an ideal scenario would be to only have Header + Locator + Footer.
This way your Locator can perform with the fastest loading speeds. But also search engine crawlers will only find SEO relevant data and content to the Locator.

You can read next about Tips to improve your Locator page.

What's to know about URLs?

The URLs created by the Locator + Pages widget follow a certain format, which are machine readable and improve SEO.

A URL to a page, where our widget is embedded could look like this: https://www.mydomain.com/en/locator#!

The script in our widget will add a so called Hashbang #! to the URL, which is required to generate the Location Page URLs. Find out more about Hashbangs here and learn how to remove them here.

A location page's URL would then look like this: https://www.mydomain.com/en/locator#!/l/city/street-streetnumber/locationid

As you can see a Location Page URL is not only machine readable, but also contains SEO relevant data, as it contains location data.

You can change the last parameter of the URL from being the locationId, to become the location identifier. In order to do so you will have to use data-useidentifier="true" attribute inside the widget element.

To make sure Google picks up your URLs after the Locator was successfully implemented we recommend to follow our guide for the indexing of the pages.

Provide content for users and crawlers

When thinking of a mosaic, in terms of SEO, it's clear that every piece of data that you put into our platform will have some kind of SEO effect. So, when managing your location data, you should not only think about submissions to directories, but also about the data published on your Locator's Location Pages.

Location Data

Most of the location data can be published on Location Pages. Therefore, we apply a simple rule when filling out your profiles: The more the better!
Ideally every data field is filled with meaningful information. Meaningful for users, but also for search engine crawlers. We want to use SEO relevant keywords, as often as possible - without creating senseless descriptions.

As long as you fill out data fields, which are published on both directories and your Location Pages, search engines will be able to find the data, compare it and identify it as being identical. Search Engines will recognize your data as up to date when they can find various sources with the same data.

Content List

With our Content List feature, you are able to create and publish additional content, which is published on directories, but mainly important for your Location Pages. This content is published in a machine readable format and should therefore be phrased in a meaningful way by using keywords.

Use meaningful meta tags

Have you set your meta tags properly? Google might have issues identifying the pages and their content as individual since the location data is identical or, at least, very similar. This might be the case, when your locations are named identically and are located in the same city.

In either way, we advise you to add meaningful and, ideally, individual tags per page. As our script does add the tags automatically and dynamically you might think possibilities are limited. But we came up with a solution to add SEO relevant information in the tags per location page.

You can define these four different Locator attributes inside your widget code:

• data-mainpagetitle
• data-mainpagedescription
• data-localpagetitle
• data-localpagedescription

Whereas the first two are for the meta tags of the Locator map part itself, the other two allow to set tags for the location pages.

So, for "data-localpagetitle" and "data-localpagedescription", we support creating one of each tag with individual content per Location Page. This is facilitated by placeholders.

A placeholder is a term representing a location data-field of our platform. By adding the placeholder to the tags, our script will recognize them and dynamically create individual meta tags per page, which are recognized by Google.

Supported placeholders are: $name, $city, $address, $zip, $keywords and any $custom_field name (if available).

Using a custom field as a placeholder for your meta tags, you can enter unique titles and descriptions for each page. 

Example:

The meta tags for a Location page of McDonald's with the address Alexanderplatz 1, 10178 Berlin would be:

• data-localpagetitle="Welcome to $name"
• data-localpagedescription="This a description of our $name in $address, $zip $city."

Published 

• title tag: "Welcome to McDonald's"
• description tag: "This a description of our McDonald's in Alexanderplatz 1, 10178 Berlin"

User engagement

We offer the possibility to define and publish up to five CTA Buttons on your Location Pages. We highly recommend to use one to create direct links for review creation on GMB. This way a user can navigate directly to your location's GMB listing and leave a review.

Referencing

Website Links in GMB

You can define a website link to your location in our platform, which will be pushed towards Google My Business. Google My Business will publish the website on Google Search and Google Maps to connect your location data with a website. This website link will serve as a primary source of truth for Google when crawling and comparing data.

We recommend to set your Location Page URLs as websites of your locations and sync this data with GMB. 

Having other website links published on GMB could confuse Google crawlers and they might find outdated or no data at all. This can have negative implications to your SEO.
This should be taken in consideration, when using our Locator + Pages, to showcase locations on your website, which are not directly part of your company.
Examples would be retailers or Franchisees. Those partners will most likely manage their GMB themselves and have their own website links published.

Postings

In case you are publishing posts on social media and other platforms, why not post some news about your locations by linking its Location Pages? The more traffic there is, the better the search engines ranking can become.

Other Website Sources

An eye should always be kept on other parts of your website, not only the Uberall Locator. Are there certain website headers or footers, which contain location data? Are there phone numbers, opening hours or any other location related data published somewhere on your website? 

If the answer to the above is YES, then we recommend thinking about an API integration. In case you are not already pushing data from your database to ours and our platform is used as a source of truth by you and your colleagues, it's worth considering a connection between our database and your CMS or database. This way, edited data on our end can also be published on various other parts of your website.