Multi-Location SEO: Sites vs Pages
-
I just started with a new company that requires multi-location SEO for its niche product/service. Currently, we have a main corporate website, as well as, 40+ individual dealer websites (we host all). Keep in mind each of these dealers consist of only 1-2 people, so corporate I will be managing the site or sites and content strategy. Many of the individual dealer sites actually rank very well (#1-#3) in their areas for our targeted keywords, but they all use the same duplicate content. Also, there are many dealer sites that have dropped off the radar in last year, which is probably because of the duplicate and static content. So I'm at a crossroads...
- Attempt to redo all of these location sites with unique and local content for each or
- Create optimized unique pages for each of them on our main site and redirect their current local domains to their page on our site
Any advise regarding which direction to go in and why. Why is very important. It will be very difficult to convince a dealer that is #1 with his local site that we are redirecting to our main site, so I need some good ammo and reasoning. Also, any tips toward achieving local seo success will be greatly appreciated, too!
Thank you!
-
I would still start with the sites that aren't ranking first. The more things you try to do at once, the less predictable the outcome is and the greater the risk of a negative impact.
Start by moving over a few sites that aren't ranking that well. Gauge the impact. Do their rankings increase or drop? What about a month after you've made the move? Once you have a better idea of what the impact will be, you can move over a few more sites, and repeat the process.
A piecemeal approach may take a little longer, but it reduces your risk and gives you a more predictable outcome. It also will allow you to perfect the process of moving sites before you get to the moneymakers that are already ranking well.
-
Thank you for sharing that webinar! Great stuff!
While they are getting decent traffic, I do not want to think short term. Like you said, we could be left with nothing. Many locations have seen the drop in rankings, so probably just a matter of time. So I'm going to switch over to the unique local pages on our site and redirect their pages to the main site. Much more manageable solution with less risk of duplicate content. (ahhh...)
If I redirect their old homepage to their new local page on our site and each product page on their site to that product page on our main site we should benefit from that link juice right both nationally and locally? Their is some value in acquiring those ranking URLs, right?
-
Is being #1 bringing in traffic and $? If so, Takeshi's answer below might be worth looking into. The only problem with "If it aint broke don't fix it.", is that once it's broke, you're left w/ nothing....or worse.
REI and Cabela's do a nice job.
This Mozinar from last year is really good-
-
"If it ain't broke, why fix it?" Haha! True. Pretty sure that is the exact response from one of my dealers.
Another variable I failed to mention is that the dealer sites are running on a very old CMS version, and their current template is not compatible with updated version. Outdated CMS has resulted in a few security issues. Meaning, I am forced to make a decision.
-
They are not very unique. Same product and service just in a different regions.
- How would you respond to a local dealer that has a site ranking #1 for targeted keywords?
- Any outstanding corporate websites with good location structure you would recommend?
-
Redirecting sites that are already ranking is almost guaranteed to result in a rankings drop, at least in the short term. However, managing 40 sites is a ton of effort, especially if they're all using duplicate content, and they don't benefit from the domain authority of your main corporate site.
Why don't you start with moving over the dealer sites that aren't ranking onto your main site. That way they will benefit from the domain authority of your main domain, and you can clean them up a little with some unique content to improve their rankings. The sites that are already ranking, you can leave alone until they run into any roadblocks. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
-
It's tough to give an answer w/o knowing specifics.
If each dealer is truly unique and not just a "branch", then go for unique sites w/ unique content.
Otherwise, follow the standard corporate website structure and create a page to each location.
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 Permalinks for SEO - Custom structure vs Postname
Good Morning Moz peeps, I am new to this but intending on starting off right! I have heard a wealth of advice that the "post name" permalink structure is the best one to go with however... i am wondering about a "custom structure" combing the "post name" following the below example structure: Www.professionalwarrior.com/bodybuilding/%postname/ Where "professional" and "bodybuilding" is my focus/theme/keywords of my blog that i want ranked. Thanks a mill, RO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RawkingOut0 -
Ecommerce SEO: Shared content on product pages
Hi Guys, I am wondering what the best practices are for avoiding duplicate content on product pages that have shared content. For example, say I have a 3 different product pages for each of the following: Verizon IPhone 5 16GB, AT&T IPhone 5 16GB, AT&T IPhone 5 32GB. Obviously each product is for the most part the same (all are IPhone 5). The only differences lie in the carrier of the phone and the storage capacity. I want to write product descriptions for each page to target a variety of different keywords, but I don't want to get penalized for duplicate content. Does anybody have any experience in what the SEO best practices are for product pages that have shared content like this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cody_West0 -
Business Listing sites SEO
How websites like justdial, askme, indiamart, tradeindia do their search engine optimization? Is it different from normal seo? please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Spammy sites that link to a site
Hello, What is the best and quickest way to identify spammy sites that link to a website, and then remove them ( google disavow?) Thank you dear Moz, community - I appreciate your help 🙂 Sincerely, Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
Location.href vs href?
I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question. If I have an internal link in a div like widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled. Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as widget Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended? Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
International Image SEO - one host vs multiple hosts
I've got 3 sites (same name) located in Australia, US and UK. Currently these sites are all pulling images (I own) from 1 location. I'd like to create image XML sitemaps for each of these sites. As I see it, my options are: 1. Keeping the images hosted in the 1 place and creating image XML sitemaps for each of the 3 sites (which seems to be technically ok because https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en&ref_topic=20986 states that if the image URL isn't on the same domain, both domains need to be verified in Webmaster Tools). However, is there a risk here that the sitemaps will conflict because they are pulling from images on the same host? 2. Hosting the images locally (ie. the same images will be hosted in 3 locations) and applying hreflang in the sitemap. Does anyone know which of these options are best (obviously #1 would be more convenient), or whether there are any other options for attacking this issue? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oline1230 -
E-commerce Adding New Content - Blog vs New Page
I have an ecommerce site (www.brick-anew.com) focused on Fireplace products and we also have a separate blog (fireplacedecorating.com) focused on fireplace decorating. My ecommerce site needs new content, pages, internal links, etc... for more Google love, attention, and rankings. My question is this: Should I add a blog to the ecommerce site for creating new content or should I just add and create new pages? I have lots of ideas for relevant new content related to fireplaces. Are there any SEO benefits to a blog over new static pages? Thanks! SAM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SammyT0 -
SEO on a mature site - diminishing returns?
I have a site that has been indexed in Google since 2002. Back then, I secured all of the highly recommended links of the time, like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory, and got just a couple very high PR links from highly relevant sites. That was enough to get us top listing on our best "niche" keywords and many long tail searches. Once we got to that point, we got lazy and have just relied upon our original links and any natural links that came our way. We also have a very highly detailed Adwords campaign in which we bid on almost any keyword that has every resulted in an organic conversion. A few months ago, I decided to kick our SEO efforts up a notch and hired a company to do an aggressive link building campaign and target some very high search volume terms that we had previously given up on. The campaign has been very successful in getting high ranking for several targetted terms. However, I am seeing zero impact on our site traffic or sales. I am beginning to wonder if Google's algorithms are so efficient that all of this extra SEO work is to no avail. Is there a point of diminishing returns where it is not productive to optimize a site's organic listings any further? Between our Adwords campaign, our already pretty good organic results, and google's ability to divine a searchers intent and lead them to the most relevant results, how do you decide when there is little benefit to further optimization? It is an important question for me because I have been considering putting a lot of work into adding content to our ecommerce site and I would hate to do all that work for nothing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhkatz0