2 sites or one sites: 2 locations
-
Hello,
I have a dog training client who is offering services in 2 separate locations. We're looking to be first in the non-local search results and also rank well in google places.
Would it be better to go for 2 separate sites or one site and try to rank for 2 different locations with one site?
There's both local and standard search results when we type in our keywords.
Thanks!
-
Miriam,
This is making more sense. But how do we show 2 NAPs on one website. Do we have a page on our site for the 2nd location and list a separate NAP there than on our general contact us?
Also, if there is only one office (like my friends who own a center that trains in california and utah both and don't have an office in california anymore), then how does the NAPs work there?
I assume all of this effects the non-local SERP listings as well as the Google Places listings, and that's why we haven't been able to move up in two locations in the non-Places results.
Thanks again!
-
Hi Bob,
While I'm not sure while you've not had success with this type of work with your other website, it's definitely possible to rank highly for two locations with one website. Be sure you are following best practices for onsite Local optimization and adhering carefully to the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which are here:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528
You will need to build reviews, citations and, possibly, links separately for both locations as well as creating great, unique copy for both locations.
*You probably already know this, but just in case you don't, I'll mention that it is essential that you're using 2 different phone numbers for the 2 locations, in addition to the unique addresses. It occurs to me to mention this, because I talk to many Local SEO clients who think they should be redirecting to a single phone number and this hinders there ability to create two unique NAPs.
Hope this helps!
Miriam
-
OK. I just want to make sure you guys have been able to rank locally for 2 locations. I tried to do this in one of my sites and we can't get up to where we should be with our 2nd location (based on our metrics) with that site.
Also, he's got the exact match domains for both of the two locations' main keywords
(city)dogtraining.com
-
Agree with Egol & John - also, create unique & interesting content for each of the location pages
-
Completely agree - just go for the one site so you can maximise your efforts creating one powerful domain. This also means you don't have to worry about duplicating content or creating high quality content for two different sites.
-
I would build one site and make it really good. Use it to dominate one location and shoot for the second with a couple of pages.
Only go for two sites if the single site attack fails.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Location in URLs question
Hi there, my company is a national theater news publisher. Quick question about a particular use case. When an editor publishes a story they can assign several discrete locations, allowing it to appear on each of those locations within our website. This article (http://www.theatermania.com/denver-theater/news/full-casting-if-then-tour-idina-menzel_74354.html), for example, appears in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver section. We force the author to choose a primary location from that list, which controls the location displayed in the URL. Is this a bad practice? I'm wondering if the fact that having 'Denver' in the URL is misleading and hurts SEO value, particularly since that article features several other cities.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Penguin recovery, no manual action. Are our EMD sites killing our brand site?
Hi guys, Our brand site (http://urban3d.net) has been seeing steady decline due to algorithm updates for the past two years. Our previous SEO company engaged in some black-hat link building which has hurt us very badly. We have recently re-launched the site, with better design, better content, and completed a disavow of hundreds of bad links. The site is technically indexed, but is still nowhere in the SERPs after months of work to recover it by our internal marketing team. The last SEO company also told us to build EMD sites for our core services, which we did: http://3dvisualisation.co.uk/ http://propertybrochure.com/ http://kitchencgi.com/ My question is - could these EMD sites now hurting us even further and stopping our main brand site from ranking? Our plan is to rescue our brand site, with a view to retiring these outlier sites. However, with no progress on the brand site, we can't afford to remove these site (which are ranking). It seems a bit chicken and egg. Any advice would be very much appreciated. Aidan, Urban 3D
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aidancass0 -
Duplicating a site on 2 different ccTLDs and using cannonical
Hello, We have a site that sells a certain product on www.example.com. This site contains thousands of pages including a whole section of well written content that we invested a lot of money in making. The site ranks on many KWs both brand and non-brand related. SERPs include the Homepage and many of the articles mentioned. We receive traffic and clients to this site from around the world, BUT our main geo-targeting is UK. Due to lack of resources and some legal needs we now have to create a new site - www.example.co.uk that all UK traffic will be able to purchase the product only from this site and not from the .com site anymore. We have no resources to create new content for the new .co.uk site and that is the reason we want to duplicate the site on both domains and use a canonical tag to point the .co.uk site as the primary site. Does anyone have experience with such activity? will this work across the whole site? We need to have a fast solution here, as we do not have too much time to wait because of the legal issue I mentioned. What is the best solutions you can offer to do this so we do not lose important SERPs. On the one hand since our main market is the UK, we assume the main site to promote will be www.example.co.uk but as said earlier, we still have users from other parts of the world as well. Is there any risk that we are missing here? Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
301s from previous site
Hi! Got quite a tricky problem regarding a client, http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/ and their previous site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/ Here's the background: We have approx 1500 'listing' pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/listing/view/1925/the-barre-des-ecrins-or-the-dome-des-ecrins-mountaineering-trip They bring in min 2k hits/month, and also add to the overall site authority I suspect. They will eventually all have a home on main domain. When they do, they will also each have been rewritten to be unique, so the value of them will increase (many are currently not). We also have landing pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/view/559/volunteering-holidays- which despite being hideous are ranked fairly well (page 1 for key terms). We cannot currently fulfil all these on main domain, but do not want to shut them down and lose positioning. Choices as I see it: Make a landing page e.g. muchbetteradventures.com/volunteering and a) redirect from old landing page, b) redirect all related 'listings' to this page. May help preserve rankings of main landing page (the most important), but not of any listings? Import all listings to have a home on main domain, (probably as children of a landing page, but not rewritten to be unique just yet). Make them not accessible from homepage, and change functionality of them so that new visitors from google are told we cannot currently help them with this trip. This is more work to complete so will take longer to do and is a distraction from our core focus so needs good justification! Stay running largely as we are, slowly redirecting 1 page at a time as we carry over more and more options to main domain. This will take over 12 months min.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bestone0 -
Development site crawled
We just found out our password protected development site has been crawled. We are worried about duplicate content - what are the best steps to take to correct this beyond adding to robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Site revamp for neglected site - modifying site structure, URLs and content - is there an optimal approach?
A site I'm involved with, www.organicguide.com, was at one stage (long ago) performing reasonably well in the search engines. It was ranking highly for several keywords. The site has been neglected for some considerable period of time. A new group of people are interested in revamping the site, updating content, removing some of the existing content, and generally refreshing the site entirely. In order to go forward with the site, significant changes need to be made. This will likely involve moving the entire site across to wordpress. The directory software (edirectory.com) currently being used has not been designed with SEO in mind and as a result numerous similar pages of directory listings (all with similar titles and descriptions) are in google's results, albeit with very weak PA. After reading many of the articles/blog posts here I realize that a significant revamp and some serious SEO work is needed. So, I've joined this community to learn from those more experienced. Apart from doing 301 redirects for pages that we need to retain, is there any optimal way of removing/repairing the current URL structure as the site gets updated? Also, is it better to make changes all at once or is an iterative approach preferred? Many thanks in advance for any responses/advice offered. Cheers MacRobbo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | macrobbo0 -
Site Wide Link Situation
Hi- We have clients who are using an e-commerce cart that sits on a separate domain that appears to be providing site wide links to our clients websites. Therefore, would you recommend disallowing the bots to crawl/index these via a robots.txt file, a no follow meta tag on the specific pages the shopping cart links are implemented on or implement no follow links on every shopping cart link? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RezStream80