Concerned about cannibalization for local SEO results. Should we move some of our location pages to a subdomain?

[RosemaryB]

Currently we are providing local SEO recommendations for a well known pharmacy chain.  Like most major brands they enjoy multiple organic (not just 3 pack results) listings when people search for local phrases such as "Dallas pharmacy clinics'".

The issue is that all these listings are coming from the same domain page.  We are seeing multiple listings both branded and non-branded search queries.

Our concern is that Google will someday decide to choose one listing as the most authoritative and nix the rest of the local listings which will reduce their first page search engine saturation.  To maintain first page saturation we are considering recommending to the client that they move some of their location listings
to a subdomain (different IP address) to avoid a Google "clean up".  Please note that our client is certainly not using any "doorway" pages but some of these are very scarce on content.  They do not have an issue with duplicate content either.

By using subdomains could we help maintain our client's first page saturation?  Any links to articles would be much appreciated.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Rosemary,

Thanks for the clarification. For a pharmacy chain (or any other franchise) here is what would typically be appropriate:

1. You have a single website.This website has some basic pages like home, about, specials, contact and what have you.

2. In addition to this, you build a unique page of high quality for each of your locations. I don't recommend subdomains. I recommend subfolders. So, this would look like: thepharmacy.com/sugar-land for your store in Sugar Land Texas, and thepharmacy.com/dallas, for your store in Dallas. If you have more than one location in a city like Dallas, your URLs might look like thepharmacy.com/dallas-deep-ellum and thepharmacy.com/dallas-highland-park. Put the complete contact info (NAP) at the top of each page and then create strong content to make the pages interesting, helpful and unique.

3. From your Sugar Land citations, across the web, be sure you are linking to the landing page you've created on the site for Sugar Land, ditto for Dallas citations, etc.

This would be considered a standard methodology for any multi-location business.

How you then showcase these pages on the website needs to be dictated by the number of locations you have. You want them to be easy to find. You might check out a chain like REI.com. Look at how they are surfacing locations for their users and how they are making their pages unique. They do a good job!

Hope this helps!

[RosemaryB]

Thanks for the detailed response and questions Miriam.  Just to be clear I am not referring to "listings" but organic search results for individual store locations.  Would have just one additional subdomain with store listings (and different content of course) be appropriate for our client?    Our client does have local Google, Bing and Yahoo! business listings for each store location.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Rosemary,

Sometimes, local lingo can be a bit of an obstacle in having a clear conversation. I want to be sure I understand what you are saying here when you are talking about 'listings'. To me, a listing is a citation - such as your Google+ Local listing, your Yelp listing, your Bing Places listing, etc. I believe you may be talking about city landing pages on your website, instead. Is this what you are describing:

1. You have a multi-location business with physical offices in various locales?

2. You do not have a strong page on the website for each of these offices? Instead, all of your search engine results, including local pack rankings and organic rankings, are pointing to your home page?

3. You have a unique set of citations for each physical office? You have a Google+ Local page for each, a Bing listing for each, a Best of the Web listing for each, a Yelp listing for each, etc?

Is this all correct? Please, provide as much detail as would be helpful.

[DmitriiK]

Since you are talking about specific location-related results, my guess is that there is no much use in trying to have many local pages for the purpose of "flooding" Google results. If somebody searches for "Hyperlinks Media Houston", then Google will serve the results for Houston only and won't serve other locations pages. Therefore the placement of those pages doesn't really matter.

[RosemaryB]

These are unique pages showing up in the subfolders.  However all of these listings are still from the same domain (same IP address).  Some of these extra listings are not that important, however they are nice to have for first page saturation reasons.  We were thinking of moving these lesser important pages to a subdomain since they are on a different IP address.

[DmitriiK]

Hello, there.

_"The issue is that all these listings are coming from the same domain page" _- It is an issue, indeed. My recommendation would be to create unique pages (I wouldn't go with subdomains, I think that's just too much for each location. At the same time make sure that you have all locations in local directories. This will help Google not to "nix" the results.

I'd say look how big companies do it - let's say Apple and do the same way.

About links - https://moz.com/learn/local - good guide.

Hope this helps.