One page for each store or one page with all our stores locations? SEO/2020

Question

We are improving our company's website and we are struggling to identify which may be a better way to present our stores to our customers and for SEO.

I read this question: Which is better for SEO, one page for all products or one page for each product? ...but it was asked 5 years ago, some other web articles I found regarding this subject are 10 years old. For example this one

We have 5 stores, each may differ in products offered, payments methods, size, professionals, attending hours, etc.

Option 1: One page containing all stores in a list/grid layout with all their information

Option 2: Each store will have its own page with a common searched phrase H1 ("Hearing Aids in Town A") and other SEO strategies. These pages would be accessed through our site main menu.

Maybe an option 3?

A colleague said that option 1 is more modern and better accepted by search engines nowadays. But we are not sure.

Answer 1

I definitely vote for option 2. Each physical store is a separate entity. Each web page, which in turn is an HTML document, can also have only one subject. If a webpage presents a list of stores, then the subject of that webpage will be a list. If the web page represents only one store, then this store will be the subject of the web page.

The web page representing only one store has the following positive items:

• The content of the web page will be unique because your stores have many differences, such as the image of the store, service area, opening hours, assortment, staff and so on.

• Accordingly, the structured data of such a web page will present unique content (if this data is correctly implemented). This will help users quickly and easily find their search goals related to your products. For example: "Buy MASSAOLA DI BRANZO near me".

All of the above is quite difficult to implement in the list. The likelihood that a user who is interested in the products of your stores will request a list of stores is pretty low. Probably, for this reason, Google pays a rather low level of attention to lists and scans lists about two or even three times less often than landing pages, which in your case may represent separate stores. In the search results, you can also often find information about the target web page that offers a particular service or product than a list.

Answer 2

The answer is always, whichever way is best for your human visitors. That way even as the latest SEO fads come and go, you're giving the people a good user experience.

If you have many stores but only a tiny amount of information that differs from store to store - like address and hours - it's likely that a single page will be best. That way visitors won't end up on a page with a huge header and footer and just a tiny bit of content. (And search engines won't see that 90% of the HTML of each page is identical, and penalize it as duplicate content.) You can claim Google and Bing businesses for each storefront and still appear in local search results.

If you have many stores but a ton of information that varies, like perhaps the management team's photos / titles / contact info, which product lines the stores carry, or any other distinctive features, it may make sense to have one page that lists them all and an additional page for each individual store. The benefit for SEO here is that each individual store page can be optimized for the local market it's in. So especially if the stores are in different metro areas or states, this can make it easier to rank in local results for each store. But again, only if humans will actually benefit from the individual store pages, and not just click through to find hardly any information.

If you have just a few stores, it may still make sense to have a single page listing all of them so visitors can read through all the information on one page.

Really, it all comes down to your customers' needs. If they'll find individual pages the most useful, do that. If they'd find a single page more useful, do that.