Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to Structure URL's for Multiple Locations
-
We are currently undergoing a site redesign and are trying to figure out the best way to structure the URL's and breadcrumbs for our many locations.
We currently have 60 locations nationwide and our URL structure is as follows:
www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}
Where {location} is the specific street the location is on or the neighborhood the location is in. (i.e. www.mydomain.com/locations/waterford-lakes)
The issue is, {location} is usually too specific and is not a broad enough keyword. The location "Waterford-Lakes" is in Orlando and "Orlando" is the important keyword, not " Waterford Lakes".
To address this, we want to introduce state and city pages. Each state and city page would link to each location within that state or city (i.e. an Orlando page with links to "Waterford Lakes", "Lake Nona", "South Orlando", etc.). The question is how to structure this.
Option 1
Use the our existing URL and breadcrumb structure (www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}) and add state and city pages outside the URL path:
Option 2
Build the city and state pages into the URL and breadcrumb path:
www.mydomain.com/locations/{state}/{area}/{location}
(i.e www.mydomain.com/locations/fl/orlando/waterford-lakes)
Any insight is much appreciated. Thanks!
-
Hi David,
Typically, your main landing pages are going to be those that represent the city of location, as in:
etc.
What I'm trying to understand is if you are saying you have more than one office within a single city (as in orlando office A, orlando office B, orlando office C) and are trying to hash out how to distinguish these same-city offices from one another. Is this the scenario, or am I not getting it? Please feel free to provide further details.
-
David -
It looks like there are two main options for you:
Keep the same URL structure (option 1), and create category pages that are state-based / area-based, that then have a short description of each location in that geographic area, with a link to their location page.
This is typically how it might be done with an eCommerce site, where you'd have a parent category (i.e. shoes) and then a sub-category (i.e. running shoes).
The downside to this is that you risk having duplicate content on these category pages.
Option #2 would be my recommendation, because you are including the area / state information into the URL.
One company that does not do this well is Noodles & Company. Their location URL looks like this:
http://www.noodles.com/locations/150/
... where "150" is a store ID in a database. Easy to pull out of a database table. Less helpful to the end user who doesn't know that store ID 150 = the one closest to them.
It would be much better to have it listed like:
http://www.noodles.com/locations/Colorado/Boulder/2602-Baseline/You don't want to go much beyond 4 layers, but it's a better way of indicating to Google and other search engines the location tree.
Also, I'd highly recommend using a rich-data format for displaying the location information.
For example, on the Customer Paradigm site, we use the RDFa system for tagging the location properly:
Customer Paradigm
5353 Manhattan Circle
Suite 103
Boulder CO, 80303
303.473.4400
... and then Google doesn't have to guess what the location's address and phone number actually are.
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
-
Canonicalising a product with multiple variants
I am working with an ecommerce site and have encountered an issue I haven't come across before and would appreciate some advice on how to proceed. There are multiple variation products with one master product and then up to 20 or 30 variant products, the variation could be colour, size or both. The site has been set up to canonicalise all the variations to the master variant product, which I understand to be best practice. But, this is where the issue occurs, the master variant product URL 302 redirects to one of the variant product URLs. Example below. My question is, is this harmful to our SEO efforts? Would be be best to canonicalise to a preferred colour or size variation? EXAMPLE: Master variant product: www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123 Seeing this product on the page and clicking will 302 redirect to www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456 On page www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456 the canonical tag is www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123 Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | SimonKenworthy0 -
Duplicate 'meta title' issue (AMP & NON-AMP Pages)
how to fix duplicate meta title issue in amp and non-amp pages? example.com
On-Page Optimization | | 21centuryweb
example.com/amp We have set the 'meta title' in desktop version & we don't want to change the title for AMP page as we have more than 10K pages on the website. ----As per SEMRUSH Tool---- ABOUT THIS ISSUE It is a bad idea to duplicate your title tag content in your first-level header. If your page’s <title>and <h1> tags match, the latter may appear over-optimized to search engines. Also, using the same content in titles and headers means a lost opportunity to incorporate other relevant keywords for your page.</p> <p><strong>HOW TO FIX IT</strong></p> <p>Try to create different content for your <title> and <h1> tags.<br /><br />this is what they are recommending, for the above issue we have asked our team to create unique meta and post title for desktop version but what about AMP page?<br /><br />Please help!</p></title>0 -
Will shortening down the amount of text on my pages affect it's SEO performance?
My website has several pages with a lot of text that becomes pretty boring. I'm looking at shortening down the amount of copy on each page but then within the updated, shortened copy, integrating more target keywords naturally. Will shortening down the current copy have a negative effect on my SEO performance?
On-Page Optimization | | Liquid20150 -
Use of '&' in meta title
Hi, I know that use of '&' would be helpful to save space and also add more keyword variation to the title tag. But just want to make sure if it matters if I use '&' in most of my title tags? And also is it common to use more than & in one title? Would the following title be different in Google's perspective regardless of the title length? I am thinking they are all targeting the keywords 'fruit cake' and 'fruit bread', but the first one is the best. buy fruit cake & bread buy fruit cake & fruit bread buy fruit cake and fruit bread Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | russellbrown0 -
H2's vs Meta description
in some of my serp results the h2's are showing up instead of the meta description. i have read that H2's arent really valid anymore. can someone clarify this for me?
On-Page Optimization | | dhanson240 -
Multiple Organization Schema on the same site
I creating a preferred supplier list on my site and wanted to use the Organization Schema for the company details. Is there a issue with having more than one org schema on the same site? or should I just use the one for my company. Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | gregdicksonuk1 -
No Data Available for this URL
Hi,
On-Page Optimization | | ostiguyj
I really don't understand why I have this message "No data available for this URL"
in my SEOMOZ campain. (www.bienchezsoi.ca) When I look at my page rank, I get a score of 0 I have no idea of to fix it. Please help. Thanks0 -
How do we handle sitemaps in robots.txt when multiple domains point to same physical location?
we have www.mysite.net, www.mysite.se, www.mysite.fi and so on. all of these domains point to the same physical location on our webserver, and we replace texts given back to client depending on which domain he/she requested. My problem is this: How do i configure sitemaps in robots.txt when robots.txt is used by multiple domains? If I for instance put the rows Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapNet.xml
On-Page Optimization | | nordicnetproducts
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapSe.xml in robots.txt, would that result in some cross submission error?0