Different Geographies - New Domain or Subdomain?
-
I have a site that is successful on the SERPs for a certain geography, let's call it City A (I'm sure you can't tell what it is from my username). I'm moving to a new city in another state so I will be building my business in this area (City B).
Should I create a new domain for City B with CityBWebsiteDesign.com or should I create a sub-domain called CityB.BrandableCompanyName.com and just redirect CityBWebsiteDesign.com to the URL for offline marketing purposes only?
My current website BrandableCompanyName.com has some authority with Google. Will it be better to building something on the sub-domain and get any sort of cross-benefits or are there really no benefits to be had between sub-domains? The benefit of going with CityBWebsiteDesign.com would be having a keyword rich URL but I would basically be starting from zero with building authority.
Specific experience you've had with this or cited examples would be great for the discussion!
Thanks,
Jared -
I'm not abandoning the city or the website so I don't really want to change the main website to the new city.
If I basically create a whole new website with content and SEO for CityB at BrandedCompanyName.com/City-B, would it be more difficult to rank for 2 separate geographies on the same domain? I'm basically thinking that this "subfolder" for CityB would have it's own site with unique content and I could point the CityBWebsiteDesign.com to this subfolder just for offline marketing purposes.
Does this seem to be the best solution?
Thanks,
Jared
-
If you are not leaving the company behind, I would suggest flipping the current brandedsite.com to the new city. If you didn't start with CityAWebsiteDesign.com, then you shouldn't need CityBWebsiteDesign.com.
If you need to change the URL in some way to reflect this change... perhaps you're keeping the old office open etc, then the best option would be a subfolder, just brandedcompanyname.com/City-B-website-Design
That way you keep the domain authority of your website, and you get the benefit of the keyword rich url.
Hope this helps!
Tom
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
-
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | murraycustomhomescom0 -
Duplicate content across different domains in different countries?
Hi Guys, We have a 4 sites One in NZ, UK, Canada and Australia. All geo-targeting their respective countries in Google Search Console. The sites are identical. We recently added the same content to all 4 sites. Will this cause duplicate content issues or any issues even though they are in different countries and geo-targeting is set? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickstar0 -
Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?
Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imran20780 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
Is it safe to redirect our .nl (netherlands) domain that we have just purchased to our .com domain?
Hi all! We've recently developed a German version of our website with German translation and now we have just purchased a .nl domain, but with this one, we want all of the copy to remain in English. Is it ok to redirect our .nl domain to our current .com website or will this give us bad SEO points? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldsze0 -
Hit by Penguin, Can I move the content from the old site to a new domain and start again with the same content which is high quality
I need some advice please. My website got the unnatural links detected message and was hit by penguin.. hard. Can I move the content from the current domain to a new domain and start again or does the content need to be redone also. I will obviously turn of the old domain once its moved. The other option is to try and identify the bad links and change my anchor profile which is a hit and miss task in my opinion. Would it not be easier just to identify the good links pointing to the old domain and get those changed to point to the new domain with better anchors. thanks Warren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | warren0071 -
Create a new XML Sitemap for a blog subdomain?
What would be the best way to go about this? A site just put a blog on http://blog.domain.com/ Should there be a separate XML Sitemap for that particular subdomain or should the original XML Sitemap for the main domain be sufficient? Looking forward to your responses. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Sub-domains and different languages
Hi there! All our content is in two languages: English and Spanish, but they're basically the same (sometimes longer, sometimes shorter). We have the English content under a subdomain (en.mydomain.com) and the Spanish one under another subdomain (es.mydomain.com). First of all: is that correct? Is it better to have it under folders or under subdomains? But the most important question. When a user enters to mydomain.com is redirected through a 302 to the Spanish subdomain or to the English subdomain, depending on the language of his browser (microsoft.com works this way). We have now a lot of links pointing to mydomain.com but... where is all this link flow going?? Are we losing it? Should we have a landing page under mydomain.com pointing to both subdomains? or maybe redirect it through a 301 to just one of the subdomains, then redirect the user to his language if necessary? Thank you very much!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bodaclick0