SEO for a franchise business
-
Were about to embark on an SEO project for a franchise business with about 150 franchises.
Would it be best to give all of the franchises individual domain names or house them under the one domain?
If they were on the same domain would it be worth setting them up with sub domains or with a URL so city.mydomain.com vs mydomain.com/city
Thanks
-
Rand wrote a whole post a couple of years ago about when to go domain vs subdomain vs folder. It covers things pretty well from a technical SEO point of view:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
When I read your question, it really seems more of a business strategy question, rather than a technical SEO question. The one consideration is that - would franchisee's take a stronger ownership in their business and their territory if their business was represented by an individual domain name, rather than a sub-folder on a main website.
If you could see people going out and networking, and putting a domain name on a business card, they could probably acquire a lot of local business links in this way (Chamber of Commerce, etc) that would in the long run boost the brand awareness of the main franchise.
Giving each franchisee their own domain name might also help with local rankings, if you can get a domain name that includes both the business function and location in the name (for example PittsburghRugCleaning.com) - since exact match domains still get a boost over other domains that don't.
On the other hand, putting everything as a subfolder or subdirectory would be much less work from a hosting side of things.
-
Hey acs,
Take a look over here. A detailed description and best practices when working with domains/subdomains.
Clotaire
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
-
Domain forwarding or redirects for SEO?
Hi all! A client of mine owns several top level domains which are not in use, let's call them example.nu, example.de, example.net and so on. The current website is example.com.
Technical SEO | | JHultqvist
When checking the technical status of the unused domains I realized that all but one are forwarded (via DNS) to example.com and only one has a 301 redirect. Should I redirect all of them by means of 301 or let them stay forwarded? Very few of the domains have any other sites linking to them. Any thoughts would be really appreciated! Jesper0 -
Big SEO Changes
Firstly, this is quite extensive so thank you to anyone who answers some or all of the below! So this is quite a lengthy ordeal, and I'm going to start by saying that I'm no SEO expert (yet). I've paid for SEO for years and only on the odd occasion has it made any real difference. It has come to the point now where I've spent so much money on SEO over the years with practically no benefit that I can't afford to do it anymore, so I am teaching myself. So, back in July my website was hacked for a total sum of three weeks. My SEO/Hosting company at the time didn't do anything about it, let the hack sit there and didn't even take the site offline. It just so happened that at the time I was changing over to a new site at the time anyway, so I launched the new site (completely different in structure to the old one), did all of the relevant 301 redirects, and my traffic hasn't recovered since. I have gone from around 100-150 daily visits to 0-10. The descriptions, keywords, alt image tags, h1 & 2, meta data, etc. is all much better (a lot of it was empty on the previous site) on the new site than it was on the previous site so I was assuming it would be better, but it isn't. Anyone got any suggestions as to why this might be? Here are some specific questions: Canonical Problem? My site is ecommerce and lists some products in several categories, that has resulted in a high duplicate content rate. Is it expected/accepted by google that this would be the case for an ecommerce website or do I need to sort out some serious canonical urls to fix the issue? The site structure of my website could also be a problem, but I'm not qualified enough to know for sure. If you view a product/sub-category, then remove the category section of that link, the product will still appear. I don't know if this structure is good or not? i.e. if you click both links below, the link will appear all the same. http://thespacecollective.com/space-clothing/nasa-and-space-t-shirts http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-and-space-t-shirts Is this a problem for SEO? Duplicate Product Tag Problem? I have many duplicate product tags appearing on many products, should these be blocked in the robots.txt? i.e. http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown-cm-meteorite-acrylic http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown Site Code Structure When choosing the template I would use for my website I did not stop to consider if the code was SEO friendly, this on my part was due to my ignorance on the subject. Is the site structure SEO-friendly or is it hindering my efforts? Website: http://thespacecollective.com Again, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read/care about the issues facing a newbie. My only option now is to learn SEO myself (which is well overdue), so any advice/answers are appreciated!
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Can a CMS affect SEO?
As the title really, I run www.specialistpaintsonline.co.uk and 6 months ago when I first got it it had bad links which google had put a penalty against it so losts it value. However the penalty was lift in Sept, the site corresponds to all guidelines and seo work has been done and constantly monitored. the issue I have is sales and visits have not gone up, we are failing fast and running on 2 or 3 sales a month isn't enough to cover any sort of cost let alone wages. hence my question can the cms have anything to do with it? Im at a loss and go grey any help or advice would be great. thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | TeamacPaints0 -
What effect does HTTPS have on SEO for a public site?
I have a client who I've been working with for 4 months but getting NO TRACTION at all on their SERPS. This is unusual for me! The only difference to their site from other clients is that the whole site is https so I'm wondering if that's making a big difference. The site is: https://www.cnc-ltd.co.uk Any help of hints would be great thanks in advance Steve
Technical SEO | | stevecounsell0 -
Duplicate Content on SEO Pages
I'm trying to create a bunch of content pages, and I want to know if the shortcut I took is going to penalize me for duplicate content. Some background: we are an airport ground transportation search engine(www.mozio.com), and we constructed several airport transportation pages with the providers in a particular area listed. However, the problem is, sometimes in a certain region multiple of the same providers serve the same places. For instance, NYAS serves both JFK and LGA, and obviously SuperShuttle serves ~200 airports. So this means for every airport's page, they have the super shuttle box. All the provider info is stored in a database with tags for the airports they serve, and then we dynamically create the page. A good example follows: http://www.mozio.com/lga_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/jfk_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/ewr_airport_transportation/ All 3 of those pages have a lot in common. Now, I'm not sure, but they started out working decently, but as I added more and more pages the efficacy of them went down on the whole. Is what I've done qualify as "duplicate content", and would I be better off getting rid of some of the pages or somehow consolidating the info into a master page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | moziodavid0 -
Onsite SEO Strategy for a large accommodation site
Hi All I have been thinking about the best strategy for keyword optimisation on a forthcoming accommodation website I am involved with. This may be a bit of a newbie type question, but most of my work has been on considerably smaller sites to date.... Lets say the site will have 1 primary landing page for "Hotels in Bristol" and then 50 pages that are each for a hotel in Bristol. The aim would be for the primary page which will be a browse/search result type page to rank well for the term 'Hotels in Bristol' and other similar terms. If each of the hotel listing pages that have a hotel in Bristol on, have the phrase 'Hotel in Bristol' contained within the title, url, page content, maybe headings/alt tags etc. will the result be that the rank for the site is 'spread too thin' across the domain? Whats the best way to drive all the relevancy and keyword usage on the 50 listing pages, to the primary page such that that is the one that ranks well? And the other pages rank more for the hotel name etc? I guess one way would be to avoid using the words hotels and Bristol in the title/URL etc.. but the natural approach for usability (not SEO) would be to use these words i.e. http://www.newtravelsite.com/hotels/bristol/stgeorgeshotel/ Or would each of the 50 listing pages simply need a followed, anchored link pointing the main landing page? I'm sure there may be a fundamental technique to do this that has alluded me so far, but any help, thoughts or guidance much appreciated! Regards Simon
Technical SEO | | SCL-SEO0 -
Importance of SEO Friendly URLs
Hey SEOZ! How important do you all think SEO friendly URLs are to SEO. Here is an example: Non: http://www.domain.com/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=2964 Friendly: http://www.domain.com/product_name_here.html I have always heard mixed reviews but did an experiment comparing results on the same domain and actually noticed quite a difference with the friendly ones. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 6thirty0
