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
-
I am temporarily moving a site to a new domain. Which redirect is best?
A client is having their site redeveloped on a new platform in sections and are moving the sections that are on the new platform to a temporary subdomain until the entire site is migrated. This is happening over the course of 2-3 months. During this time, is it best for the site to use 302 temporary redirects during this time (URL path not changing), or is it best to 301 to the temp. domain, then 301 back to the original once the new platform is completely migrated? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matt3120 -
Using a Sub Domain as a Main Domain?
Hi, I'm working on a site at the moment and the sub domain is acting as the main domain. This occurred when the site was redesigned and built on a sub domain for testing but it was never moved to the main domain when it went live (a couple of years ago). So little or no pages are live on domain.com but all on sub.domain.com. It's a large company but they have very poor rankings. Would you recommend that they move the sub domain back into the root folder? Does this involve renaming/re-pointing URLs? Thanks Louise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MVIreland1 -
Subdomain optimization - advices
Hi, I need some specific advices on which is the best way to optimize the subdomain of a main domain. Besides meta title, description, etc. Br.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormar0 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
.ac.uk subdomain vs .co.uk domain
I'd be grateful if I could check my thinking... I've agreed to give some quick advice to a non profit organisation who are in the process of moving their website from an ac.uk subdomain to a .co.uk domain. They believe that their SEO can be improved considerably by making this migration. From my experience, I don't see how this could be the case. Does the unique domain in itself offer enough ranking benefit to justify this approach? The subdomain is on a very high authority domain with many pre-existing links, which makes me even more nervous about this approach. Does anyone have any opinions on this that they could share please? I'm guessing that it is possible to migrate safely and that there might be branding advantages, but from an actual SEO point of view there is not that much benefit? It looks like most of their current traffic is branded traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Franchise sites on subdomains
I've been asked by a client to optimise a a webpage for a location i.e. London. Turns out that the location is actually a franchise of the main company. When the company launch a new franchise, so far they have simply added a new page to the main site, for example: mysite.co.uk/sub-folder/london They have so far done this for 10 or so franchises and task someone with optimising that page for their main keyword + location. I think I know the answer to this, but would like to get a back up / additional info on it in terms of ranking / seo benefits. I am going to suggest the idea of using a subdomain for each location, example: london.mysite.co.uk Would this be the correct approach. If you think yes, why? Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Domain certificate
Hello, I would like to know if there is any certificate we can buy to increase the Seo of my website. Thanks very much for your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cartageno0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0