Large Global Site Structure
-
Hi, I have a question about the advised structure for a website that I'm currently building. It's a large international brand with it's main office in the UK. The main website is the .com but there is a growing international franchisee network.
I've built the .com site on Wordpress but I'm not sure if I the best way forward would be to create each international website on a separate hosted site or just include it in the .com Wordpress structure using the The WordPress Multilingual Plugin.
So to sum up... should I build the entire global network on one domain and then use WPML plugin or should I build separate websites for each International franchisee?
Hope some one can educate me on the best route to take.
Thanks Moz Community
-
Great thanks for the responses Kate. I'll digest what you have sent me and decide there. Thanks again for the help, it's much appreciated
Alex
-
My deepest apologies. I don't know how I missed your response.
If each franchisee has their own section of the site that they can keep updated, then I would go down the route of geo-targeting. I doubt you would use multiple translations within any one specific section of the site per franchisee. Let me know if you think that would be needed. And what I mean specifically is a new franchisee in UAE wants their part of the site, their content, in Arabic and English. I don't even know if that would be an ask someday for those specific languages, so please forgive my ignorance, but I hope you get the idea. If that will not ever be needed, stick with just geo-targeting.
There are two options from here in terms of structure.
1 - Based on current UK setup - all on .com
You'd need to change URLs for current providers to get on a new setup that will allow geo-targeting. This might cause temporary organic traffic drops, but best in the long run in my opinion. The URL structure would be:
domain.com/uk/belfast
domain.com/uae/dubaiNow, this is assuming the same structure of franchisees and one per city. You would geo-target the first subfolder and leave the content to the franchisees. If needed, general content not specific to a city or location would be at the country level (first subfolder) and that is the geo-targeted part.
2 - Only one set of content for UAE - Change URLs
If you are not following the same UK structure and only want one set of content for the UAE and want to use the same domain, you need to change URLs like the above, but not add cities to the UAE section.
URL Examples:
domain.com/uk/belfast
domain.com/uae/3 - Based on current UK setup - ccTLDs
Another option is to have a different site for each country. Go for the ccTLD in each country. Use the .com to geo-target to the UK if that is all that is targeted with that content. This is a heavier investment as each site would need its own dedicated marketing plan that includes outreach and link building.
4 - Only one set of content for UAE - UK on www subdomain
If you are not going to do the franchisee system per city like in the UK, it gets tricky. You can't, right now, geo-target by city. So to geo-target the current structure to the UK, you'd need to geo-target at least the subdomain www, if you use that. If not, see the option below. You could technically geo-target www.domain.com to the UK and uae.domain.com to the UAE. This allows you to use the same root domain, but many SEOs have different theories on how subdomains are treated in regards to domain authority pass down to subdomains that are not the root domain. This is an option, but I don't recommend it.
URL examples
www.domain.com/belfast
uae.domain.com5 - Only one set of content for UAE - UK on root subdomain
If you are using the whole domain (domain.com) for the UK, you would need to geo-target the whole root domain to the UK to get the geo-targeting set up. That would mess with the UAE content being on that domain. You would need to purchase a ccTLD then. I doubt this is the route you want to take, but it's an option.
This is a lot but i hope you can see how things change based on your needs now and in the future. Sorry there isn't a direct answer, but it changes in every situation. Let me know if I can help with more clarification!
-
Any update on this?
-
Hi Kate, many thanks for sharing that with me. I have completed the questions. I'm still a tad unsure of which direction to go in. The company is selling artificial grass and offers maybe 8 different grass products. The UK network is made up of about 30 cities/areas and each franchisee has their own web page within the main .com site. - so companyname.com/glasgow or companyname.com/belfast
I'm not sure if it's best to keep the international network on the same Wordpress site iecompanyname.com/ea/en for United Arab Emirates network in English or create a separate Wordpress website, hosted from a separate folder on the .com server and repeat site structure but change the content for the UAE etc..
Does that make sense? If you have any advice that would be great. By the way, your questions advise that I 'Take the Integrated Approach'
Many thanks
Alex
-
Hi! I built a tool just for this question. Can you go to the link below, answer the questions and let me know what your result is?
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
-
Google tag manager on blocked beta site - will it phone home to Google and cause site to get indexed?
We want to develop a beta site, in a directory with the robots.txt blocking bots. We want to include the Google Tag Manager tags and event layer tracking code on this beta site. My question is that by including the Google Tag Manager code, that phones home to Google, will it cause Google to index this beta site when we don't want it indexed?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
How to correct error in customized posttype WP site
Hi folks Can anybody help me. I foolishly, dogedly followed a Lynda.com tutorial for developing an 'online portfolio in WP'. Little did I know that my initial assumption - to use the 'twenty twelve' rather than the 'twenty eleven' theme would land me in such deep water. I was attempting to learn php on my own. All went well, until, --- the index page for the customized post type. Now I have two beautiful customized posttypes, 'companies' 'coverage' and no idea how to create an index page for either. I can't do the next step! I have tried every permutation - changing the permalink settings, changing them back, desperately searching for any handle to the nebulous links within the menu section. The only thing I can do (and have done for now) is to link the menu item 'company' and the menu item 'coverage' to a single post. Then the poor visitor has to scroll through the posts individually. I tried contacting the tutor and Lynda.com, to no avail! I have searched forums and found this is a common problem, but because I am so confused and novice to php they might as well be speaking Chinese. To compound my problems, looking through 'Wordpress SEO' for Yoast, I am painfully aware I can't go to the first basic step and fix the peramilinks to 'Postname' as that just makes my flakey menu collapse like a pack of cards. Help!
Web Design | | catherine-2793880 -
Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages. We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic. Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.
Web Design | | bizmanuals0 -
Internal linking for small site
I have a site with 13 pages, 6 are product pages, 5 are free tips pages (the other 2 are the home page and contact form). Currently I have the navbar at top of site with a "products" dropdown menu for the 6 product pages and a "Tips" dropdown menu for the 5 tip pages. All categories except the contact page are at the bottom as breadcrumbs, the homepage is "home" and the rest are relevant user friendly keyword anchor text. So I have 2 more pages to ad to "Tips" and am wondering whether to have a new 2nd level tips page that links to a 3rd level of 7 different tips pages, or keep it shallow as it is, with only 2 levels from the homepage to the other (now 13) pages, with a potential of 22 pages in the foreseable few years? (and some graphics work to make it user friendly like how Zappo's has categories to the side on each of its drop down navbar menu's and non-link text categories for its bottom of page breadcrumb links) Can those aforementioned pages linking to each other in the footer dilute link equity? (I think that's one of the primary reasons I'm curious). What do you think of this: http://www.dbswebsite.com/blog/2012/08/08/internal-linking-101-5-best-practices/ (I guess I should no follow my contact page), could it be better to have a 2nd level page for "Tips" to get more equity to that page rather than across all 7 tips pages? I have read around about this on here (hence how I found out about Zappo's) and elsewhere and wanted ask to make sure.
Web Design | | Zoolander0 -
Unable to set preferred domain, can I verify a site that's already redirected?
I'm in the process of trying to set a preferred domain in webmaster tools -- to set our www version as preferred vs. the non www. version. IT is already redirecting non-www to www, but I get this message when trying to change settings "Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://mnn.com/. Please verify http://mnn.com/." While we own the domain, I am not sure how we can have Google access a file at [http://mnn.com/some_file when we are forwarding all requests for non-www to our www site.
Web Design | | Aggie
Note: The apache rewrite predates me and I'm not sure how / why we have two domains set up, but I'm trying to fix the preferred domain now.Am I able to verify the non version once the redirect is in place.Any ideas??? Help???Thanks!Lisa0 -
How to determine if my site map needs work?
I recently spoke to a consultant at a search conference who took a look at my site map and mentioned it looked like google would have a hard time crawling the site and indexing new pages and changes. I am managing an ecommerce site with a bunch of products, however, I am not an XML expert by any means so i'd appreciate any advice on what to look for in the site map that would possibly be affecting googles ability to crawl/index.
Web Design | | GregWhiteStarMedia0 -
Branding site
We are starting a new used car site in latam, and we are in the process of developing the brand, part of the team would like to have the "auto" (spanish for car" in the name and some no. The question is, form a SEO point of view, how strong signal is to have the string auto as part as the URL, and can you have a complete unrelated url and have several URLs with the auto string on it pointing in a 301 way to the non unrelated brand name as a way around? (sorry about my english, I hope you can understand the question) PS, yes, there are a lot of queries involving auto in our target market.
Web Design | | Bligoo0 -
What is wrong with our site?
Hello Seomoz friends. I've about to pull all my hair out and need to turn somewhere. Our site, www.sightmax.com has been around since 2004. We used to be ranked at the top of page two on google under the keyword "live chat". We are no on page 4, heading to page 5. Can anyone take a look at the site and see if anything jumps out at you? The only way we have been able to get on the first page, is the pay for google adwords (which we've been doing every month for 7 years). Again, the site www.sightmax.com and the keyword is "live chat". Any help or feedback would be appreciated SO MUCH! Thanks! Eric
Web Design | | EricWeber0