How to approach SEO for a business with three distinct focus areas
-
I have a client who has asked for the development and optimisation of three websites for a business located at one address. They offer specialised skin care, have a make-up artistry division and also a luxury portraiture/photographic service offered to clients. I have suggested one website, based on all I have read in this community (Possum etc.).
Their concern is that they will seem like a "master of none" and envision three sites interlinked. Before I push back and categorically say that this is a poor idea, I wanted to gain some insight from those of you who may have dealt with this scenario before. I need to explain how one domain can be structured to present all three these areas as distinct, given that the home page will speak to all three. Any ideas regarding site structure and optimisation strategy would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
-
Three websites = 3x the work...and budget needed. Similar to a medical clinic when it comes to services. List this company's services and optimize accordingly. If it is an incredibly competitive market, niche website may be the way to go.
If I had it my way, in a medium to low competition market, i would focus on strengthen the content & DA on one site, rather than 3.
-
Hi Werner,
This is a really interesting scenario, not typical of this type of question, in that you are genuinely talking about 3 different businesses here. Most often, we see questions in the forum from something like an HVAC contractor who wants to do one website for heating and another for cooling. The answer to that is an unequivocal "no", because the business is really a single entity trying to fake the appearance of being multiple businesses for the sake of SEO.
In your client's case, she has 3 unique businesses that would be represented by 3 unique Google My Business categories. Because of the different categories, we'd think less about Possum problems in this scenario, despite the shared address, because someone looking for a make-up artist is not going to be doing the same search as they would if they were seeking a portrait photographer. If she had 3 different offices, each offering just one of the services, it would make sense to consider 3 different websites accompanies by 3 sets of citations/reviews/social outreach, etc.
But, the fact that this is one owner, at a single location would make me steer her away from the multi-site approach. Managing the marketing for 3 businesses is likely to lead to burnout of either finances or creative resources, and there is the off-chance that Google could mistake the model as spam, deciding that the 3 businesses are actually just one, given the share address. I'm actually not too scared that they would do this, but it is a risk, even if she were to establish the 3 separate phone lines staffed by people who always answer the phone for only the correct business.
I think the dilemma/opportunity facing your client is one of business identity. She needs to identify what connects her three services instead of dividing them up by how they differ. If she can hit upon a single business identity that covers this wide range of services, she'll have a single business to market, at a single address, with a single phone to staff, a single reputation to manage. Your client sounds creative. I'd advise brainstorming with her so that you wind up with something like a business called "Best Face" that covers having your makeup done, your portrait taken, and your skin treated all under one roof, rather than being Anna's Makeup, Anna's Skin Care and Anna's Portraits on 3 different sites. Build a single brand that revolves around celebration of the human face, or something along those lines, and put EGOL's good advice into full action, cross selling the services and creating an indelible reputation for the owner.
-
Yes, guiding structure. Showing clear ties from one service of the business to another.
-
You are spot on with that description! She is a very gifted and versatile person who needs to continue to apply what has been natural...with a little bit of guiding structure.
-
Your client sounds like a Renaissance Man. A person who has mastered many things. A Leonoardo da Vinci. If this person also has panache, presenting a business of many artistic services seems natural.
-
Thank you very much EGOL. This confirms my intended strategy, and gives some substance to the conversation I need to have. I'll need to figure out how to best structure this website so that potential clients see each offering as valuable in their own right, but also see the relevance to other services, as you have pointed out. This would also need to be coupled with some landing pages, me thinks. Thanks again.
-
I would work on convincing the client about....
-- the value of cross-selling, many current clients probably use more than one service, they bought one and then bought more
-- the importance of uniting all of your assets to perform well in search
-- the relevance of these services to one another and how that might help them rank better in google and appeal to multiple customers
-- in these businesses it is hard to find someone you can trust and satisfies you... once you find that person or business it is much easier to allow them to do additional services for you... this is building loyalty of the customer and building their respect for your business
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
-
How do Nation wide business win Local?
For example, this site https://www.kvetinyhned.cz for selling flowers is ahead of the sales of local stores that have a site but aimed only at sales in a certain area of the store
Local Website Optimization | | Martin11Martin0 -
Improve my on-page SEO
Hello, I am a photographer based in the UK, I have recently increased my prices, so SEO has become more important then ever as I need to target additional cities and wedding venues. I am looking for suggestions on ways I can ethically improve my websites on-page SEO and regional landing pages. I am running out of ideas, so any suggestions would be welcome. Do you think search engines will see these regional pages as low quality spammy pages are they not advised! If so how can I target other cities with out paying for PPC. Home page Additional Issues Is the 404 server script any good? I also have an issue, with old deleted wordpress pages, redirecting them even though there are no redirects set up in SEO yoast. I am not sure the server script on the shared hosting for 404 errors is any good, does anyone have any experience with this. For example this page returns the 404 page, however the header status is 200. http://www.robertsail.co.uk/derby-wedding-photographers-2/ If I moved to a dedicated server would this help me out.
Local Website Optimization | | Roboto19701 -
Content writing for single entity business (The use of I)
Most of my clients consist of single entity law firms in which my clients repeatedly use the pronoun "I" to describe every service they provide. I have always preferred using the business name The Law Office of..." put lawyer name here". Is it ok to repetitively use the pronoun "I" in the content. To me it feels lack luster and childish not very professional, however I have a hard time convincing the lawyers of this. What are your thoughts? Can good content be written with the repetitive use of "I"? If not is the business name sufficient or maybe another pronoun? I will be showing responses to my clients if that is ok.
Local Website Optimization | | donsilvernail0 -
International SEO - How to rank similar keys for differents countries
Hello MOZ friends.
Local Website Optimization | | NachoRetta
I work in an digital marketing agency in Argentina and since we have a lot of traffic from other Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico and Spain, we want to rank specific keywords for these countries.
We were thinking of putting new versions of the homepage in subfolders, for example /es/ for Spain, /mx/ to Mexico, etc. In these new subfolders we would place a very similar version of the homepage with a few minor modifications to work specific keywords in each country. For example, in Spain it is more searched "marketing online", and "marketing digital" is more used in Mexico and Argentina.
I have understood that to implement this we would be to place a label hrflang on the homepage directing visitors and crawlers to the correct version of each country. Is it ok?
Another concern is, whether they are very similar pages, Google does not take it as duplicate content ..
I read this:
https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
And i am not completely sure about using subfolders for each country, but i dont know how to position diferents keywords for diferent countries.
Regards,
Juan Ignacio Retta0 -
Does multiple sites that relate to one company hurt seo
I know this has been asked and answered but my situation is a little different. I am a local electrical contractor. I specialize in a service and not a product. Competition is high in the local market due to the other electrical contractors that have well seasoned sites with very good DA/PA. Although new to the web I am not new to the trade. Throughout years almost back to the AOL dialup days I have been collecting domain names for this particular purpose. Now I want to put them to good use. Being an electrical contractor, there are many different facets of work and services we provide. My primary site is empireelec.com A second site I threw online overnight with minimal content is jacksonvillelightingrepair.com. Although it is a fresh site, there is minimal content and I have put almost zero effort in to it. It appears to be ranking for keywords a lot quicker. That leads me to believe I should utilize my other domain jacksonvillefloridaelectrician.com and target just the keyword Jacksonville Florida Electrician. It leads me to believe I should use jacksonvillebeachelectrician.com for targeting electricians in jacksonville beach. And again with jacksonvilleelectricianservice.com I can provide a unique phone number for each site. Am I going about this all wrong? Everything I read says no,no,no but I feel my situation is a little more unique.
Local Website Optimization | | empireelec1 -
What is the best way for a UK company to source SEO Support to boost SERPS in USA Google?
We are a niche web retailer with a world leading product and as such are probably the best option for USA customers (even though we are based in the UK) up to 18 months ago google agreed and placed us high for USA searches and we had good business as a result however since penguin (or around that time anyways) google increased our SERPS for more local markets (UK and EUROPE) and decreased our ranks for USA with a consequent reduction in our USA sales We want to improve rank again in USA (and Canada and Australia and Russia) but need specialist help What's the best way to source that? (short of someone saying they know exactly how to do that) ant recommendation most gratefully received Tom
Local Website Optimization | | tomnivore0 -
Local SEO In A Different Language
I am pretty new to web design and SEO, so I am sure I have completely done this wrong. I work for a U.S. based equipment dealer and before I started working here my company incorporated in Canada under "(our main product) of Canada". Even before we had any SEO work done on our website, we ranked in the top 3 across Canada for our main product. The one exception to this was Quebec where we rarely got any traffic due to the language barrier. We started working to fix this last summer using the Montreal Consulate, our SEO company at the time and a translator. They each gave me the same French translation of our Company name and I had them translate the 8 most visited pages on our existing site. I then created a replica of our existing site, hosted it on the French translation of our name and started running inbound links to this site from our U.S. and Canada sites. The first thing I am wondering is if there's any issue with this practice? We have had good results so far and traffic from Quebec is way up across our three sites. The second issue I have is we just hired our first employee in Quebec and found a partner there. They are both adamant that the translation we are using is incorrect. I own the domain for the correct translation they are suggesting but I have no idea how to go about it. Any suggestions?
Local Website Optimization | | DohenyDrones0 -
What is the best CMS Approach for Multilingual Versions of Site?
We have expanded into France and Brazil and now have a someone in-house that can translate to French and Brazilian Portuguese. I own ".fr" and ".com.br" versions of our domain. We are using Wordpress for our CMS. We are currently publishing about 2 articles a week on English site which we would be translating and publishing through new international sites (when appropriate). We will be changing out photos and videos at times in addition to all the text/copy. So, before I jump deep into this I wanted to reach out for help regarding the best modern approach to this. Should I use some sort of WP Plugin that will let me manage each of these through 1 WP install or is it better to run each separately through multiple WP installs? I want to achieve this while... avoiding any duplicate content penalties. provide easy admin/editor management of publishing content. Any help/advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | the-coopersmith0