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
-
Are In-Page Tabs still detrimental to SEO?
Hi Mozers, Are in-page tabs still detrimental for SEO? In-page tabs: allow you to alternate between views within the same context, not to navigate to different areas. As in one long HTML page that just looks like it's divided into different pages via tabs that you can click between. Each tab has it's own URL, which I guess is for analytics tracking purposes? https://XXX https://XXX?qt-staff_profile_tabs=1 https://XXX?qt-staff_profile_tabs=2 https://XXX?qt-staff_profile_tabs=3
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Web accessibility - High Contrast web pages, duplicate content and SEO
Hi all, I'm working with a client who has various URL variations to display their content in High Contrast and Low Contrast. It feels like quite an old way of doing things. The URLs look like this: domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/ - Default URL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=hc - High Contrast page
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=lc - Low Contrast page My questions are: Surely this content is duplicate content according to a search engine Should the different versions have a meta noindex directive in the header? Is there a better way of serving these pages? Thanks.0 -
SEO: Subdomain vs folders
Hello, here's our situation:We have an ecommerce website, say www.example.com. For support, we use zendesk which offers a great platform that makes publishing FAQ and various resource articles very easy. We're torn between publishing these articles on our actual website, or publishing them via Zendesk. If we publish them on our website, the url would be something like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
www.example.com/articles/title_article.html On the other hand, if we publish them via zendesk, the url would look like:
support.example.com/articles/title_of_article We would like to publish them via Zendesk, however, we do no want to miss out on any SEO benefit, however marginal it may be. Doing it this way, the domain would have all of the ecommerce pages (product and category pages), and the subdomain would have ALL other types of pages (help articles and also policies, such as return policies, shipping info, etc etc). I know a long time ago, folders were preferred over subdomains for SEO, but things change all the time.Do you think setting up all the ecommerce pages on the domain, and all content pages on the subdomain, would be a lesser solution? Thanks.0 -
Wordpress - Dynamic pages vs static pages
Hi, Our site has over 48,000 indexed links, with a good mix of pages, posts and dynamic pages. For the purposes of SEO and the recent talk of "fresh content" - would it be better to keep dynamic pages as they are or manually create static pages/ subpages. The one noticable downside with dynamic pages is that they arent picked up by any sitemap plugins, you need to manually create a separate sitemap just for these dynamic links. Any thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danialniazi1 -
To land page or not to land page
Hey all, I wish to increase my sites rankings on a variety of keywords within sub categories but I'm unsure where to be spending the time in SEO. Here's an example of the website page structure: General Home Page > Sub Category 1 Home Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 > Sub Category 2 Home Page
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 We've newly introduced the Sub Category Home Pages and I was wondering if SEO is best performed on these pages or should landing pages be built, one for each of the 4 sub categories in each section. Those landing pages would have links to the "Searching / Results pages" for that sub category. Thanks!0 -
What are best practices for multi-language seo?
We are looking for best practices for multi-language seo. We are interested in any books, message boards or blogs that you can recommend. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FareCompare0 -
How Fast Is Too Fast to Increase Page Volume of Your Site
I am working on a project that is basically a site to list apartment for rent (similar to apartments.com or rent.com). We want to add a bunch of amenity pages, price pages, etc. Basically increasing the page count on the site and helping users be able to have more pages relevant to their searches and long tail phrases. So an example page would be Denver apartments with a pool would be one page and Seattle apartments under 900 would be another page etc. By doing this we will take the site from about 14,000 pages or so to over 2 million by the time we add a list of amenities to every city in the US. My question is should I worry about time release on them? Meaning do you think we would get penalized for launching that many pages overnight or over the course of a week? How fast is too fast to increase the content on your site? The site about a year old and we are not trying to scam anything just looking to site functionality and page volume. Any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioV0