The verdict
If a clinic has location pages, they belong in the header menu, not only in the footer. A footer-only link is the one you add when you want a page to exist without committing to it. Social icons are the opposite case: footer only, always, because they are exits.
A practice with three sites had all three location pages in the footer and none in the header. The header had About, Services, Blog and Contact.
Somebody visiting that site has to already know there is more than one location before they can find out there is more than one location.
Where a link sits changes what it does
This is not about link equity arithmetic. It is simpler and more behavioural than that.
A header link is a claim about what the site is. A footer link is a claim that the page exists. Both are links, both are crawlable, and they are not doing the same job.
Google’s guidance on organising a site is that a logical organisation can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site. A practice that operates from three towns and puts all three in the footer has organised the site as though it operates from one.
The three things a header location link does
Why it belongs at the top
- It answers a question the visitor has immediately. Which of these is near me is often the first thing someone needs to know, and it determines whether they read anything else.
- It is on every page, in the place people look. So the visitor who landed on a condition page from search can find the right site without going back to Google.
- It forces the pages to be real. Nobody puts a thin page in their main menu. Promotion to the header tends to be followed by somebody actually writing the page.
The objection I get
That the menu is getting long. It usually is, and the answer is not to demote the locations; it is that Services has eleven children and should have four.
A menu with Home, Conditions, Services, Locations, About and Contact is not long. A menu with nine technique pages listed individually is long, and those are the items that belong one level down.
The one that goes the other way
Social icons, footer only. I am fairly firm about this.
A social icon in the header is a link out of your website placed at the top of every page. The visitor arrived to find out whether you can help with their back; sending them to a feed is not serving that. In the footer they are findable by somebody who is specifically looking, which is the right amount of prominence for a link whose purpose is to leave.
My note: the exception is a practice where the social account genuinely is the front door, usually because a practitioner posts clinical explainers there with a real audience. That is rare, and it is worth confirming from the analytics rather than from how it feels.
Anchor text, since the link is being moved anyway
Use the town. Not “Locations” as a single item with a dropdown of “Clinic 1” and “Clinic 2”, which happens more often than you would think.
Google says that good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page being linked to. The town name is all three, and it is also the word the visitor is scanning for.
What this is a symptom of
Footer-only location pages usually mean the pages were built for search and not for visitors. Somebody read that a practice should have a page per town, made them, and put them where they would not interfere with the design.
That instinct is the tell. If a page is too thin to promote to the header, the fix is the page, not the placement. The floors that apply are in how long a clinic page has to be, and location pages carry the highest one for exactly this reason.
The short version
- Location pages go in the header as well as the footer.
- A header link claims what the site is. A footer link only says the page exists.
- Promotion to the header tends to get the page properly written.
- If the menu is too long, the problem is nine technique pages, not the locations.
- Social icons stay in the footer. They are exits.
- Use the town name as the anchor, not Clinic 1 and Clinic 2.
- A page too thin to promote needs fixing, not hiding.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and local SEO is where the location pages and the profile get looked at together.
