Best way to help a city-centric service provider market in new nearby territories?
-
Our client recently acquired new county territories outside the main area city. We could create separate location pages under the primary domain, but are wondering if micro sites with unique content (and location-including url) that links back to the location pages would also be a good idea.
There is some traction for certain location-based keywords in those areas.
Better to focus on the one domain, or augment with separate websites in different parts of the state? I can come up with plausible reasons for and against either, but would love your thoughts.
Thank you for any insight!
-
Hi Perfect Pitch Concepts,
Bede has pretty much said it all in his awesome response!
I'll only add, as you build out those new pages on your website, make maximum effort to make them totally unique and helpful to the user. Don't take the shortcut of publishing duplicate or thin pages. Find great things to write about regarding your client's involvement in his new service areas.
-
Thank you, Bede. We share your concerns and appreciate your articulating them so thoughtfully.
-
I would go with one site that has location pages for the following reasons:
- You'll probably be starting with fresh domains for your micro sites. If you use the existing site, you'll have some DA built up, which will assist your subpages. You're basically going to be counting on the fact that the location including URL is going to be a big part of getting ranked, and I'm not sure how that would play out long-term, especially given the recent(ish) EMD changes.
- I'd imagine the micro sites won't be providing any value for your customer that you couldn't provide with the main site. Why make them change sites to learn about the company? When I'm searching for products or services and see this, I get just a little bit more suspicious about the company, which makes the sale harder.
- Even with your unique content, your microsites are probably going to be fairly light on content (e.g. just a few pages) if they're all linking back to the same place, it might seem like you're gaming the system for backlinks.
- You probably don't have an easy way of handling your NAP data on all of these different sites. Duplicate local listings suck if they get generated accidentally.
- And, probably the biggest one for me - if you stick with one site, and get your internal structure right, link building efforts for any of the location pages (or the main page) are going to benefit the other subpages as well, so you get more bang for your buck. That's more sustainable in the long run.
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
-
Best way to do site seals for clients to have on their sites
I am about to help release a product which also gives people a site seal for them to place on their website. Just like the geotrust, comodo, symantec, rapidssl and other web security providers do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssltrustpaul
I have notices all these siteseals by these companies never have nofollow on their seals that link back to their websites. So i am wondering what is the best way to do this. Should i have a nofollow on the site seal that links back to domain or is it safe to not have the nofollow.
It wont be doing any keyword stuffing or anything, it will probly just have our domain in the link and that is all. The problem is too, we wont have any control of where customers place these site seals. From experience i would say they will mostly likely always be placed in the footer on every page of the clients website. I would like to hear any and all thoughts on this. As i can't get a proper answer anywhere i have asked.0 -
New Domain VS New Page Backlink?
Assuming you've already got a link from:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz
sitea.com/page1 (Moz domain rank 55, Moz page rank 30) You have two choices for another link: 1. Another link on the same domain but a new page:
sitea.com/page2 (Moz domain rank 55, Moz page rank 30) 2. A link on a new domain but with a lesser domain & page rank
siteb.com/page1 (Moz domain rank 30, Moz page rank 20) Assuming you have no other links to your site - both sites are relevant to your industry, both 5 years old, both have the same number of visitors/external links/ads and the content and anchor text remains the same. Which will have a bigger impact on SERP movements? Sam0 -
Clean URL help!
Hi all, In short, i'm looking to redirect examplepage.html to examplepage .I've got rid of the .html, sitewide this morning. However I want to redirect Google & people who have bookmarked the old url structure. Currently if you have the extension on or not, it will show in your browser. I'm wanting /examplepage.html to 301 redirect to /examplepage I've gone the normal way I'd do it by adding in .htaccess: Redirect 301 /examplepage.html http://www.example.com/examplepage I'm assuming it isn't redirecting as the example.html page is no longer... what is the way around this? Thanks for any help! In firefox the error of the page is: The page isn't redirecting properly Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Best way to handle page filters and sorts
Hello Mozzers, I have a question that has to do with the best way to handle filters and sorts with Googlebot. I have a page that returns a list of widgets. I have a "root" page about widgets and then filter and sort functionality that shows basically the same content but adds parameters to the URL. For example, if you filter the page of 10 widgets by color, the page returns 3 red widgets on the top, and 7 non-red widgets on the bottom. If you sort by size, the page shows the same 10 widgets sorted by size. We use traditional php url parameters to pass filters and sorts, so obviously google views this as a separate URL. Right now we really don't do anything special in Google, but I have noticed in the SERPs sometimes if I search for "Widgets" my "Widgets" and "Widgets - Blue" both rank close to each other, which tells me Google basically (rightly) thinks these are all just pages about Widgets. Ideally though I'd just want to rank for my "Widgets" root page. What is the best way to structure this setup for googlebot? I think it's maybe one or many of the following, but I'd love any advice: put rel canonical tag on all of the pages with parameters and point to "root" use the google parameter tool and have it not crawl any urls with my parameters put meta no robots on the parameter pages Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Panda Recovery - What is the best way to shrink your index and make Google aware?
We have been hit significantly with Panda and assume that our large index with some pages holding thin/duplicate content being the reason. We have reduced our index size by 95% and have done significant content development on the remaining 5% pages. For the old, removed pages, we have installed 410 responses (Page does not exist any longer) and made sure that they are removed from the sitempa submitted to Google; however after over a month we still see Google spider returning to the same pages and the webmaster tools shows no indicator that Google is shrinking our index size. Are there more effective and automated ways to make Google aware of a smaller index size in hope of Panda recovery? Potentially using the robots.txt file, GWT URL removal tool etc? Thanks /sp80
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sp800 -
What is the best way to link between all my portals?
Hi I own 12 different portals within gambling, they do more or less work and feel like this one, Casinotopplisten, what is the best way for me to link between all of them? Since there is alot going on in Google these days I havent linked between the sites at all, but i feel that to be a somewhat waste. So here is my three ideas so far, in ranked order: Add a menu at the topp right of the site, or footer, that links to the 10 different sites with different languages. The text link should then only be "Norwegian, Swedish, English etc.." Basiclly the same as about, but in addition linking to the "same page" in the other languages. As all pages have the same article set for startes this can be done. Dont do any linking between the sites and only link to the sites separately from our company blog/site.. Dont link at all. I should add that all of these sites are on different IPs with different domains and all in different languages. Hope someone can add their 2c on this one.. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MortenBratli0 -
New folder structure
We are in the process of relaunching one of our website's that will use a totally need folder structure. Previously we used mydomain.com/content/country/region/city/district/hotel_name/ Now we are changing to make the URL shorter, more precise - since we are using a new CMS, to be mydomain.com/gb_Hotel-Name/ My question is currently we've in the region of 10,000 pages indexed in Google. So we are going to have to create 301 permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. From your previous experience, is this the correct way of approaching the task.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeilTompkins0 -
Entering into a new website franchise model, currently subdomains, client wants scalability. Best approach?
This is my first experience with a franchise model business. It is less than 1 year old and on page SEO is in pitiful shape with hundreds of subdomains already for specific locations. What is the best approach to take here? I've seen a lot of debate regarding subdomains and folders and it seems the folder structure may be the best long term course of action but I'm still a bit unclear on this. What is the best approach to ensure that all SEO addressed on the site has the most impact and moving forward, what is the best method to scaling the SEO for franchisee owners. What is the best practice to help each location be best positioned in search in the future, how much should the corporate franchise site typically provide in terms of SEO services to franchisees, and how does the lead SEO consultant scale those services to franchisees?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | methods0