Every location deserves its own page

A lot of multi-location sites start with one page called Locations. It lists every store with an address and a phone number, maybe a map full of pins. It's quick to build and easy to keep up. It's also the weakest page on the site.

Think about how people look for you. They don't search for your brand's locations page. They search for the thing they want plus where they are: tacos near the station, open late, the one on Fifth. A list page can only be found as one thing. A page per store can be found as each store.

Why one list isn't enough

A list page has one title, one description and an address block that's really thirty. Search engines can't tell which store it's about, because it's about all of them. When someone searches in one neighborhood, the page that says the most about that neighborhood wins, and your list says very little about any of them.

People have the same problem. On a phone, a long list is a scroll past stores you don't care about to find the one you do. When we built the store finder for a restaurant chain, the whole design came from one question: where can I eat right now? The answer is one store, open now, with directions and a call button. That's a store page, not a list.

What each page needs

A store page isn't the homepage with a different address. It should answer everything someone would ask before they walk in, for that store. At minimum:

• The full address as text, not in an image, with a map and a directions link.
• Opening hours for each day, plus holiday hours when they differ, and whether the store is open right now.
• A phone number that dials when tapped, and the order or booking button if you have one.
• The menu or price list for that store, as text. If items or prices vary by location, this is where it shows.
• What's different about this one: parking, seating, step-free access, the nearest station, private rooms.
• A few real photos of the place, so people recognize it from the street.
• Structured data describing the business, its address, its hours and its location, in a format search engines read directly.

The structured data is the part nobody sees and the easiest to get wrong. It's a short block of code that describes the store as a local business or restaurant. Search engines use it for the panels that show hours and directions. If it says the store closes at ten and the page says eleven, you've given them two answers, and they'll pick one.

Keep each fact in one place

The real risk with forty store pages is forty places for the hours to be wrong. Store each fact once, and have every page, the structured data and the store finder read from it. Change the Sunday hours in one field and the page, the map and the markup all change together.

It matters most when you open a new store. When we built the location page builder, every new location page had been copied by hand from an old one, and the old store's phone number always slipped through. So the tool clones the layout, then checks the new page for anything left over from the original. Phone numbers, addresses, store names, an old email address in the footer: one leftover is enough to send someone to the wrong side of town.

The location page builder also lets a page sit as coming soon and then go live with one switch. A page that exists before the store opens has time to be found.

How it helps search, without tricks

None of this is clever. A store page shows up for that store because it's about that store: one address, one set of hours, one menu, written as text a search engine can read. Your map listing and your page should agree on the name, address and phone number, character for character. Link to every store page from the store finder and the footer, so none of them sit orphaned.

Skip the shortcut of generating hundreds of near-identical pages for towns you don't have a store in. A page per real location is useful. A page per nearby suburb is filler, and search engines treat it that way.

Where to start

If you have a list today, you don't need a rebuild to fix it. Start with the facts.

1. 1.Put every store's address, phone and hours in one spreadsheet, and check each one against your map listing.
2. 2.Make one page per store from a single template that reads from that data.
3. 3.Add the menu, the details that make each store different, and a few photos.
4. 4.Add structured data from the same source, then run it through a structured data checker.
5. 5.Link every page from the store finder and the footer, and keep the list page as an index of them.

Then pick one person who owns the hours. Most wrong store pages aren't a design problem. They're a holiday nobody updated.