The 15 Best SEO Companies for Multi-Unit Businesses

Running a business with multiple units (or locations) is no easy task. The challenge becomes even greater when it comes to optimizing your online presence for SEO. From technical SEO to hyperlocal keyword targeting, there’s always a consistent struggle between task prioritization – choosing tasks that’ll have a sustainable impact on the bottom line. 

In addition to this, every SEO technique deployed must seamlessly fit into your overarching marketing objectives without disrupting brand cohesiveness across diverse units and locations. 

So, how do you find the right SEO agency that understands the intricacies of multi-unit business SEO and is skilled in handling the complexities involved? 

In this guide, I ranked the top 15 best SEO companies tailored for multi-unit businesses based on their respective areas of specialty. Whether you want to expand your business to multiple locations or manage multiple locations simultaneously, this guide will help you make an informed decision. Ready? Let’s get right at it!

The 15 Best SEO Companies for Multi-Unit Businesses:

• HigherVisibility: Best Overall
• NextLeft Marketing
• SmartSites
• Victorious SEO
• Graphite
• IgniteVisibility
• Animalz
• Nivara Commerce
• Seer Interactive
• QueryClick
• Directive Consulting
• Single Grain
• Thrive Digital Marketing
• Flying Cat Marketing
• uSERP

For more information about what makes each of these agencies great at SEO for multi-location businesses, read their company bios for detailed insights.

HigherVisibility: Best Overall

Best for: All SEO services 

Headquartered in: Memphis, United States

Clients They’ve Worked With: Evolve Bank & Trust, Hotworx, Ziebart, Orangetheory, New Roads, Allied, Brilliant Earth, and more. 

Industries serviced: B2C, B2B, DTC, eCommerce, Fintech, SaaS, Law, automotive, and home builders. 

Length in business: 14 years

Accolades: 2024 SEO Agency of the Year by Search Engine Land, Inc. 5000, 4X Best SEO Agency of the Year (AOTY) award, Landy awards (by Search Engine Land), US 2020 search awards winner, US 2021 agency award winner.

Why HigherVisibility? 

“HigherVisibility has delivered nothing but exemplary results since taking over Caliber Collision’s’ SEO account. They’ve increased our organic conversions by 141% along with vaulting Caliber’s website to the top online authority in the collision industry.” 

Greg Clark, Chief Marketing Officer, Caliber Collision. 

This is one of the many reviews we have received from our enterprise clients. At HigherVisibility, we understand that the cookie-cutter approach isn’t suitable for SEO, especially for multi-unit businesses. The SEO that drives sustainable results is bespoke and uniquely tailored to your business needs and goals. 

Let’s expound on the Caliber Collision case highlighted above. 

Caliber Collision is the largest collision repair company in the collision industry, serving over 1700 locations in the US. 

Although they are already a leading brand in the collision space, their online presence says otherwise. Their goal? To optimize their online presence for each location, rank for their primary keywords and regain organic traffic lost from spammy links.  

What we did: 

Since we offer holistic SEO services headed by industry-vetted professionals, it was easy to identify their website issues and propose a sustainable SEO strategy to correct them. 

In total, we performed: 

• Technical audit to identify underlying issues for all web pages
• Strategic keyword research to discover highly-searched keywords with conversion potential 
• On-page SEO to ensure content is visible on search engine ranking pages (SERPs)
• Content development 
• Off-page SEO (analyzing their backlink profile and deploying link-building strategies) 
• Conversion rate optimization 

… to mention a few. 

In 12 months: 

• Organic traffic soared by 28.04%
• Conversions grew by 141.5%
• Attained the top spot for three primary (highly competitive) keywords

As I pointed out earlier, a one-size-fits-all rarely works for multi-unit businesses. This is why we start by thoroughly analyzing your website to comprehensively understand your challenges and propose actionable, data-driven solutions that align with your business goals. 

Each technique we deploy at HigherVisibility is heavily driven by consumer insights, as they’re the focal point of your overall marketing campaign. This helps us ensure our strategies resonate deeply with your target audience, fostering a cohesive brand identity across all locations and units. 

NextLeft Marketing

Best for: SEO Content Creation

Headquartered in: San Diego, United States

Clients they’ve worked with: Luna DNA, Widen, Fiskars, ShipCalm, PaperMart, eLocal, Island Federal Credit Union, Hallmark inc., etc. 

Industries served: BigCommerce, B2B, eCommerce, Credit union, non-profits, 

Length in business: 7 years

Accolades: US Search Awards, Inc. 5000, B Corp. certified 

Why NextLeft? 

NextLeft might have made its debut into the marketing industry less than a decade ago, but they have snagged a few accomplishments that ranked them among the top best SEOs in the world. 

They’re on a mission ‘to rid the world of digital clutter by helping brands create helpful, relevant content their customers are searching for online.’  

For multi-unit businesses, NextLeft creates scalable SEO content marketing strategies to help you compete successfully and remain relevant in your niche. They cover all aspects of your content marketing strategy, from content audit to producing high-quality content that naturally attracts links from high-profile sites.  

You can also benefit from their related digital marketing services: 

• Web development and design
• Google Ads
• Paid media 
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

Next is…

SmartSites

Best for: Web design for SEO

Headquartered in: New Jersey, United States

Clients they’ve worked with: Velocity Moving, Air Duct Brothers, AGA Truck Parts, among others

Industries served: B2B, eCommerce, health, automotive, legal, non-profit, hospitality, non-profit, and education

Length in business: 12 years

Accolades: 7X Inc. 5000, 2023 Microsoft Advertising select partner, BBB A+ rating, #1 website design agency by G2, #1 User experience agency by Upcity, #1 rated web design company by BestFirms, etc.

Why SmartSites?

SmartSites isn’t another random SEO agency. Their comprehensive approach to digital marketing makes them one of the best web design agencies for SEO. 

The best thing about SmartSites is they’re not solely focused on web design. They provide full-scale SEO and digital marketing services, including content management, PPC advertising, technical audits, on-page and off-page SEO, email marketing, social media management, etc. 

Victorious SEO

Best for: National SEO

Headquartered in: San Francisco, United States

Clients They’ve Worked With: Wayfair, Topgolf, Pagerduty, Heap, FastSpring, etc. 

Industries serviced: SaaS, eCommerce, B2B, real estate, travel, luxury and news publishers. 

Length in business: 10 years

Accolades: US SEO Agency of the Year award, Clutch Enterprise SEO AOTY award, and Search Engine Land Global SEO AOTY award. 

Why Victorious SEO? 

Victorious SEO is a data-driven digital marketing SEO agency that specializes in international, national and eCommerce SEO for businesses of all sizes and verticals. Their portfolio is impressive, and they have a track record of delivering tangible results for their clients. 

One notable aspect of Victorious SEO is their client-first approach to SEO. They tailor their campaigns to your business KPIs and closely monitor the market trends, competitive landscape and algorithm updates for proactive adjustments. 

For example, their keyword research strategy for national SEO campaigns starts with a competitive analysis to uncover opportunities to outperform your competitors. 

You’ll also largely benefit from their recurring optimization, detailed reporting and excellent customer support. 

Graphite

Best for: SEO Content Strategy

Headquartered in: San Francisco, California

Clients they’ve worked with: Upwork, Hinge Health, Honey, MasterClass, Thumbtack, Reforge, WebFlow

Industries served: B2B, SaaS

Accolades: NIL 

Why Graphite?

Graphite stands out because of its unusual approach to SEO. They strongly believe – and I agree – that having a real-time strategy, understanding and prioritizing user intent and using powerful tools produces better results. 

They meticulously combine three forces – direction, speed, and impact – to identify and implement strategies that completely and quickly transform your SEO results. 

Another interesting thing about Graphite is how they integrate AI into their SEO process. They use machine learning to analyze over 200 million keywords and organize them according to topical relevance. 

What does this mean for you? 

Instead of guessing, you can make an informed decision on the keywords that’ll drive the highest conversions for your business units. Their AI is also trained to create SEO-optimized briefs to guide your writers towards creating content that converts.  

IgniteVisibility 

Best for: International SEO

Headquartered in: Pennsylvania, USA

Clients They’ve Worked With: Therapeutic company, Rocket Resume, Driven Brands, Tony Robbins, etc. 

Industries serviced: eCommerce, B2B, B2C, D2C, SaaS, non-profits, and real estate

Length in business: 28 years

Accolades: 5X Inc. 5000 company, Clutch top SEO agency in the US award, The Manifest top paid Media agency in the US

Why Ignite Visibility? 

IgniteVisibility does one thing exceptionally well: international SEO. They specialize in multiregional and multilingual website projects and can help tailor your SEO to rank in non-English speaking countries (over 40 countries)!

How does this help you? 

IgniteVisibility can help to identify and target high-intent keywords based on user preferences and cultural nuances in each location. They utilize geo-targeting strategies, such as creating location-specific business profiles, attracting backlinks from relevant local websites, etc., to ensure your website serves content to users based on their location. In addition to this, they have translation experts skilled in translating thousands of web pages to any language and region. 

Animalz

Best for: Enterprise Content Marketing

Headquartered in: New York, United States 

Clients they’ve worked with: Airtable, Amazon, Amplitude, GoDaddy, Google, Wistia, Intercom, Social Capital, Unit 21, WorkOS

Industries served: SaaS and Tech

Length in business: 8 years 

Accolades: NIL

Why Animalz?

Animalz is less than a decade old but is adept at creating high-end content marketing solutions for enterprise brands. They’ve partnered with several leading brands, including Google, Amazon, Wistia, and ZenDesk, to mention a few. 

One thing you’ll love about Animalz is their ability to always think outside (and sometimes, without) the box. Their ideas are unique and logically presented in a way that engages your readers and converts them to paying customers.

They handle all things content – content audits, keyword research, lead generation content (eBooks and Whitepapers), content distribution (email newsletters and social media copies) etc. 

Nivara Commerce

Best for: eCommerce SEO

Headquartered in: Wyoming, United States

Clients they’ve worked with: Pilgrims, Peacasa, Her Story, My Way Up, Futurise, Lamore, Goju, AlloraUSA, beach CITY

Industries served: eCommerce, D2C, B2C

Length in business: 8 years

Accolades: NIL

Why Nivara: 

Nivara Commerce is your one-stop shop for all things eCommerce SEO. They handle every aspect of your consumer purchase journey, from product listing sales to logistics and delivery. They can also handle your product sourcing and private labeling, set up your storefront on diverse eCommerce marketplaces, optimize your business profiles for sales, etc. 

Their wheelhouse is Shopify SEO (a plus if you’re already using Shopify for your business), but they also have experts proficient in other tools such as WordPress, MailChimp, Weebly, Wix and WooCommerce. 

Your multi-unit business can also benefit from their CRO services, including website audit, UX (user experience), checkout and eCommerce optimization, data analysis, lead generation, A/B testing, etc. 

Seer Interactive 

Best for: Data-driven SEO

Headquartered in: Philadelphia, United States

Clients they’ve worked with: Intuit, Leafly, Autodesk, children’s health, TIME, Psychic source, ASOS, Drexel University 

Industries served: B2B, B2C, Health, Education, SaaS, Automobile, Finance

Length in business: 21 years

Accolades: B Corp. certified

Why Seer Interactive? 

In SEO, data is your greatest asset. 

Seer understands this, and that’s why all their SEO and digital marketing campaigns are based on data-driven insights. Moreover, they have a proprietary tool, the Seer Supernova Cloud-based data platform, that streamlines data and extracts valuable insights to inform your marketing strategies. This is helpful if you cater to a global audience and can’t manually sort your business data.  

For instance, if you’re an enterprise brand selling casual wear, the Seer Supernova Cloud-based platform can help cut through voluminous customer data to find what makes your customers click through and make a purchase. The platform also helps to detect variations in consumer behavior so that you can tailor your SEO strategies accordingly, right before your competitors do. 

Their intelligent approach to SEO makes them one of the best for multi-unit businesses. They also offer other distinctive digital marketing services such as market intelligence, customer insights, conversion rate optimization (CRO), paid media and creative branding. 

QueryClick

Best for: PPC Marketing

Headquartered in: Edinburg, United Kingdom

Clients they’ve worked with: Sally, Aggreko, The Scotch Malt Whiskey Society, Beer Hawk, 

Industries served: eCommerce, B2B 

Length in business: 15 years

Accolades: Covidae 2022 Most effective attribution solution and most effective advertising campaign 

Why QueryClick? 

As a multi-unit business owner, sometimes SEO isn’t enough. You need to back it up with paid advertising, especially when expanding your business to new markets or regions. This is where QueryClick comes in. 

Although they’re a full-scale digital marketing company, QueryClick stands out as an expert in paid advertising. They adopt a holistic, data-led approach for precise geotargeting to ensure your ads reach the right audience in their locations and at the right time. 

QueryClick operates in markets across America and the Middle East and extends to other continents worldwide. Outside PPC, they offer programmatic SEO, social media advertising, and data analytics services.

Directive Consulting

Best for: SaaS SEO

Headquartered in: New York City, United States

Clients they’ve worked with: Adobe, Amazon, Snap Inc., Zoominfo, Uber Freight, Datastax

Industries served: SaaS

Length in business: 9 years

Accolades: NIL

Why Directive Consulting? 

Directive is another performance-based marketing agency for tech brands. They provide all-encompassing SEO services for tech brands, including on-page SEO, content marketing, technical SEO and conversion rate optimization. 

Their goal? To make data-driven decisions that improve overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. As a result, they’ve generated excellent results for their clients. 

Another thing to note about Directive is that they’re highly customer-obsessed. Remember that the SaaS buyer journey isn’t linear. It often requires up to 15 touchpoints before converting a visitor into a paying customer. And for multi-unit businesses, it’s more.

Directive conducts thorough customer research (qualitatively and quantitatively) to inform its keyword research, content strategy, and landing page creation. This also powers their content creation process, enabling them to publish pain-point-centered content that caters to your target buyers at every point of their journey. 

Single Grain

Best for: Technical SEO audit

Headquartered in: Los Angeles, United States

Clients they’ve worked with: Nextiva, Intuit, Harris Teeter, Twenty20, Peet’s Coffee, Lock n’ Lube.

Industries served: B2B, SaaS, B2C, eCommerce

Length in business: 14 years

Accolades: NIL

Why Single Grain?  

Although Single Grain is a full-service digital marketing company, they also excel in technical SEO for Fortune 500 brands, multi-unit businesses, and start-ups. 

They offer comprehensive technical SEO strategies to help improve your website performance, mitigate ranking errors and scale successfully. This includes: 

• Technical SEO audit to identify crawl ability and indexability issues, 
• Optimizing URLs for target keywords, 
• Incorporating schema markup into your website, 
• Using XML sitemaps and canonical tags, 
• Optimizing for core web vitals, internal linking to improve website architecture, etc. 

You’ll also benefit from their extensive SEO expertise and skills to improve your bottom line. 

Thrive Digital Marketing

Best for: Local SEO and advertising 

Headquartered in: Texas, United States

Clients They’ve Worked With: Lifetime HOA, CP Networks, Unique Safaris, Nationwide Construction, Roatan Real Estate, etc. 

Industries serviced: B2B, B2C, education, FinTech, law, medical industry, manufacturing, home services such as HVAC, etc. 

Length in business: 18 years

Accolades: Clutch 2023 Top Digital Marketing Agency, 2023 Forbes agency council member, The Manifest top SEO provider, 2023 Influencer Marketing Hub Top 10 agency, etc. 

Why Thrive Internet Marketing Agency? 

Thrive offers full-scale local SEO services to businesses of all sizes and industries. They conduct a local SEO audit (including review analysis, Google Business Profile page audit, local citation analysis, etc.) to find opportunities that boost your organic visibility and attract the right audience. 

They also ensure your diverse GMB locations are listed in top industry directories, optimize your local citations and use location-based keywords to funnel targeted customers to your site.   

Flying Cat Marketing 

Best for: Best B2B SaaS SEO Strategy

Headquartered in: Barcelona, Spain

Clients They’ve Worked With: Operlo, Hotjar, Softr, Maze, TestGorilla, Livestorm, Stonly, ActiveCampaign, etc. 

Industries serviced: Cybersecurity, SaaS, HR Tech, B2B SaaS, MarTech, FinTech and hospitality tech. 

Length in business: 4 years 

Accolades: NIL

Why FlyingCat Marketing? 

If you’re a well-known brand in the B2B SaaS space and actively looking for an agency to help ideate an effective SEO strategy, you should consider FlyingCat marketing. As I pointed out above, they’ve partnered with notable B2B and SaaS companies, like HotJar, Operlo, etc., to increase their monthly recurring revenue and establish thought leadership through SEO. 

Think of Flying Cat as an extension of your marketing team. If you do not wish to outsource your entire SEO, you can hire them to give practical and insightful advice on your SEO strategy. Their goal is to help you attract sales-qualified leads organically while driving other meaningful business impacts. 

The best part about FlyingCat is that you don’t need to sign 1-year retainers. They offer an initial commitment of 4 months, after which you decide if they’re worth your investment. 

uSERP

Best for: Link-building and digital PR

Headquartered in: Denver, United States

Clients they’ve worked with: Monday.com, Copy.ai, Mailshake

Industries served: B2B, SaaS, IT

Length in business: 16 years

Accolades: #1 Link Building Agency by Single Grain, Codeless Respona and SFGATE, 2022 Growth Ramp Top SaaS Marketing Agency, etc.

Why uSERPS? 

uSERPS is a full-service link-building and digital PR agency. They help you get high-traffic, niche-relevant, authoritative backlinks to your site. They help their clients land links from highly authoritative sites such as Hubspot, Forbes, etc. 

I love that their process is entirely white-hat. They conduct a competitor gap analysis to identify the fastest route to turbocharge your organic rankings. Then, they build a detailed link-building strategy (white-hat outreach and content creation) to attract links from niche-relevant sites. Aside from this, you can also benefit from their full-service SEO strategy to get even better results. 

Why You Need An Agency With Experience in Multi-Unit Businesses

Multi-unit business SEO differs from regular SEO for one- and two- paged websites. It’s more complex. This is because there are several pages involved, and most times, these pages target different locations. 

In this case, a centralized, one-size-fits-all approach will never work. Here’s why. 

Consider a national restaurant chain in the United States with multiple locations across diverse cities. The usual SEO process would be optimizing each web page for SEO, keyword research, incorporating meta tags, etc. But this (totally) excludes the diverse consumer behaviors, cultural preferences and local nuances in each location. 

A more effective approach will be identifying localized keywords for each location, publishing location-specific content, and other campaigns suited for local searches. 

This decentralized, individualistic approach is easier to ideate without factoring in costs, operational efficiency and coordination challenges that come with it. 

As a result, it can get overwhelming, costly and highly inefficient to manage a multi-unit business SEO campaign on your own, especially if it’s not in your wheelhouse. This is why you need an SEO agency with proven experience in managing multi-unit businesses. 

Aside from operation excellence, brand consistency and lower costs, you also: 

• Leverage a team of specialized experts to handle your SEO. This mitigates the risk of errors, bringing more results at a lower cost and shorter time. 
• Have access to a full marketing stack. Marketing tools aren’t cheap. The best of them are much more expensive to acquire. By partnering with the right agency, you can access these tools (most of them use them to optimize and refine strategies) without the burden of individual subscription, reducing your overall marketing expenses. 
• Stay ahead of industry trends. As I mentioned earlier, reputable SEO agencies only hire the best talent trained to stay abreast of industry trends, navigate algorithm updates, and identify revenue-generating strategies so your business remains a leader online and offline. This is impossible if you’re involved in other operational aspects of your business.
• Gain scalability and flexibility. If you still intend to expand your business to new markets, you need to deploy sustainable SEO strategies tailored to help you grow. This also requires a bespoke approach for the diverse locations you are (or wish) to target. The right SEO agency has experience helping brands scale and can propose or recommend scalable and flexible growth strategies. 

Read more: How to choose an SEO agency that aligns with your business goals.