Dental Office With Two Locations And Same Practice Name

[Czubmeister]

Dentists buy other practices all the time. Sometimes they change the name of the practice and other times they keep the name.

I am working with a dentist on a new website because their old one is riddled with flash (and is ugly too)  She has two practices but they have the same practice name. One of them caters to half English speaking and half Spanish speaking patients.

I'm thinking I should create a separate website for each practice mainly because we may want to design the graphics and text for the appropriate patient language probably with a English/Spanish translation button on the website?

For localization, wouldn't it be better to have a url for each physical site?

Suggestions?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Bob,

I'm getting a 'server not found' page when I tried to access your demo site. I guess I don't know what theme you're using, but I would imagine you can create whatever kind of pages or  you'd need to. If you're using something like the All-in-One SEO-Pack and permalinks, you could even make the 2 city landing pages as blog posts and just link to them from the main menu. But, I don't know what challenges you are facing with your theme, obviously.

Hope you can figure it out. I know it's sometimes tough when clients are on a tight budget. You've just got to let them know what you can do for their investment. The nice thing about websites is that they can always grow as budget becomes available. Good luck!

[Czubmeister]

I'll have to figure out how to do this. I was planning on using Wordpress for this. Here is the demo site I have so far.  dental1.datacomplete.com. I don't think this theme can be tweaked to allow for the landing pages as you described but I will give it a shot tomorrow.  Unfortunately the dentists that I am working with are going through a rebuilding process and their funds are somewhat limited so I am trying to get something up for them with cost in mind and with something that they can edit the content themselves.  Thanks again!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for answering my question. Given what you've described, I don't see the necessity for the complexity of subdomains, though others might see this differently. What I see is this:

• She has one business. This logically equals one website.

• She can create a city landing page for each of her offices on the site (mytoothdoctor.com/torrance and mytoothdoctor.com/wilmington). Yes, you can link to these from the homepage as well as from the main menu. Be sure that these pages are not simply duplicates of one another with the city name changed. They need to be unique, helpful pages of copy for the user, as well as being locally optimized.

• She can optimize her contact page, footer and other areas of the site for both of her offices...it's not like you're dealing with 20 locations here. Only two of them.

• She can offer a Spanish language version of the site as well. No problemo so long as you follow best practices on this.

• She can claim a unique Google Place page for each location, plus other local business directory listings because of the distinct location data.

In your shoes, I would be looking for the easiest-to-manage plan for this client, and unless I'm really missing something, I don't see a need for subdomains in this scenario, and certainly not for multiple websites. Build a single, powerhouse site for the client and both you and she will find it easy to manage for the long haul.

Hope my suggestions help! Miriam

[Czubmeister]

Thanks for the information.

Yes she has two locations operating under the same name and are 6 miles apart  with different zip codes and different phone numbers.

I may want to try that "Chat Live Now" type of software for her practice and she may want to give different offers to different offices.

if i used something like mytoothdoctor.com for the main site and then displayed a box to choose a location would that be kinda goofy?

Then I would have mytoothdoctor.com as the main site and then torrance.mytoothdoctor.com and wilmington.mytoothdoctor.com

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Bob,

I want to be sure I understand this correctly. When you say the dentist bought a second practice, are you saying that she now has 2 physical offices with unique local are code phone numbers and street addresses, though they share the same business name? Is that right?

If they are in 2 distinct locations with unique phone/addresses, then it is up to the client whether she wants to be running 2 different businesses, or simply be a multi-location business.

If she wants that practices branded differently, then, yes, I would vote for 2 websites, with the proviso that nothing is duplicated from one site to the other. All content must be unique for each site if she really wants to be running 2 distinct practices.

If she wants to have a single practice with different branches, I vote for building one well-optimized website and utilizing Local SEO best practices to ensure that her geo information is being correctly featured for the two locations. Again, landing pages for the two offices will need to feature unique copy (hire a copywriter who knows Local) and the footer, contact page and other elements need to be appropriately optimized in accord with best local practices. Lots and lots of businesses have more than one location, so this would just be a typical Local SEO project. Get the dentist to consult with a Local SEO if this isn't your area so that the new design has the right stuff baked into it from step one.

Regarding duplicate content on multilingual site, this is not a major concern. I recommend reading this earlier Q&A thread on this topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/site-with-multiple-languages

Hope this helps!

Miriam

[alex_pixelchefs]

Hi Bob

I have dealt with a similar situation for one of my clients. They offered same service at 2 different states and also they had a 3rd site for their educational site.

They worked with a company that had over 20 domain names forwarding in each address and created confusion. So we basically build one site http://www.adaptivemobility.com/  and we forwarded the 2 existing domains to the interanl pages of the site http://www.adaptivemobility.com/indiana/ and http://www.adaptivemobility.com/florida/ .

This worked for our client  and made it easy to promote as they usually send everyone now to their main site. But all other sites that linked to the old URls still link to the internal pages. I hoped the link will help you decide on what to do. I also agree with just having a translation option build in.

[JohnParker2792]

Hi Bob,

I would think you would need to be careful with this situation. I am unsure if duplicate content problems can arise if the content is in two different languages. I think you nailed it on the head when you said one website with a translation button.

For localization I think it would depend on how far away these locations are from each other and if both practices are doing business the same way.

It is possible to add more than one location to directories with a single URL.

Hope I helped....