Businesses with distributed local footprints face a number of unusual challenges in digital, but few are as time-consuming as nested locations. Think about it: this is the only kind of setup where local businesses—such as jewellers, ATMs, and even coffee shops—either share their addresses or are located entirely inside another business. It’s a unique situation that can quickly create complications, ambiguities, and dead ends in local search, which is a serious concern for any business that has to generate foot traffic to survive.

Of course, sharing a physical address is nothing new. Nested businesses have traditionally used suite numbers as required, or relied on the relative prominence of the mall in which they’re located. But things are rather trickier in local search, especially for nested locations that lack a unique phone number, postal code, or anything that would distinguish them from the business in which they are located.

What happens when you try to submit these listings to search engines? You will often be met with rejection as your information is considered to be spam or, at the very least, containing conflicting information. Search engines assume you are trying to overwrite the verified business already listed at that address.

How to get your nested locations listed

As a trusted partner of Google and other leading platforms, we know all the intricacies of submitting nested location data to ensure each location appears in the right format on all relevant directories. For instance, there is a “Located Within” feature in Google Maps that’s perfectly suited for this type of situation, but it is rarely used to its full potential—especially by larger businesses who are tasked with manually entering twice the amount of location information (their own and the parent location) over and over.

Need to be recognised as part of a mall? Or want to have each department of your grocery store listed online? Our Local Presence Management experts go above and beyond to provide this service where others do not. We can even accommodate temporary nested pop-ups or kiosks, adding them to indoor maps and mall directories when possible in order to generate vital online visibility during their limited run.

And what if you own the nest itself?

If you’re at the other end of the spectrum, with nested amenities inside your own business, you can still reap the benefits of listing these businesses as separate online entities. Banks should break out ATMs, grocery stores should break out departments, and hospitals should break out units. In short, every business should do everything in its power to improve the user experience and increase the exposure of their listings on Google Maps and other critical local sites.

If nested locations are a factor in your marketing, you may have a significant opportunity to get more from your local listings, especially in maps channels. We have demonstrable success creating, managing, and optimising nested listings across a range of verticals—accounting for factors and details that other agencies often miss—to generate priceless local exposure for our clients.

So find out how we can take care of all the heavy lifting in local search: get in touch with DAC today.