Single sites per location as well as group site. Should we get rid of single sites & only keep group site.
-
Currently we have several single sites for each of our dealership locations as well as an automotive group site linking to each location(dealership) website. Currently there is no landing page for each location on the group site.
To save money we were looking into beefing up our group site and getting rid of our individual location sites. 301 redirecting them to location landing pages on the group site website.
Each site has about the same authority including the group site.
Each dealership location resides in the same province(state) but some locations are a 7hour drive apart so not all within the same vicinity.
I want to ensure we continue to rank well in each location. I won't be able to include all geographic locations in the title tag on the homepage of the group site due to the character restrictions.
What would you recommend? Keeping the individual websites per dealership location OR focusing solely on a group website. I need to ensure we continue to rank well in each city where each dealership resides.
Thanks for any recommendations! It's greatly appreciated.
Thanks for everyone's thoughts & opinions.
-
All great points. The individual sites are going to be re-designed as they are old designs and the content is a little thin. I will take all your points into consideration and make a decision.
Thanks for the great answer!
-
Hi Samantha,
Good discussion going on here. I'll add my own thoughts.
For local businesses, a single site approach is generally preferred over a mutl-site approach for the following reasons:
-
Easier management for the company/webmaster
-
Reduced risk of duplicate content
-
All marketing activity goes toward building the authority of the brand and then this flows down to all locations listed on the site, instead of the authority being split up over multiple websites
-
Possible reduced risk of merges
-
Google has said a single site is a better approach. See: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-one-site-locations-15454.html
So, in general, if a client came to me and asked if they should start out with a single site or many sites, I'd say a single site 99% of the time. That being said, if the client was in your position with multiple sites already in place, I would help them assess:
-
How old these sites are
-
The quality of these sites (great content, unique content or thin/duplicate content)
-
The overall authority of these sites
-
The depth of citation building that has been done for these sites
-
The client's ability to keep multiple sites updated with fresh content on an on-going basis
-
Any problems the client is having with managing multiple sites.
Answers to these questions would help me understand how big of an asset or a liability the multi-sites are for the business. If they are spammy, low quality, low authority, few citations, it would be a no-brainer to suggest bringing everything together in a single site. But, if they are high quality with lots of citations, I would have to warn the client that some ranking drops could likely occur that would take time to recover from and that a great big citation editing job would be ahead of us to ensure that all references to the old sites had been corrected to reference the new landing pages on the single site.
So, it's going to be different in each case, and hopefully these thoughts will help you assess your own situation. Good luck! This is an important decision you are making.
-
-
There are so many ways to achieve what you want, I understand how it can be confusing. Dont feel bad! lol
Since you already have the other sites in place, take your time and optimize them all a bit at a time. You can use the smaller sites to optimize around individual locations, and then link back to your main site. Have the sites feed each other, and make them all come up at once. On the big site, create a page of basic info about the local site, and have a few links pointing out so the search engines find them. Keep it very specific, but dont over-optimize anything. We dont want this strategy to have the opposite effect, lol.
Make sure there is enough info on the local sites to support a link. If they are landing pages, I'm not sure if I would bother. If they are full sites, 10+ pages of good info, then go for it. Make sure to mark up the locations with schema rich snippets, so it is hyper-relevant to the location.
On the main site, look at a way that users can easily find the local pages. Having visitors spend longer amounts of time on all the sites can only help you. The end goal would be to get all sites seen as an authority.
If you want to combine all the sites under one roof, you can do that too, just move the sites into a subfolder under your main domain, and set up proper linking and structure. I'm only leaning towards the separate way because its already in place, and can help the local effort.
As the the amazon reference, I'm not sure that applies here. They have over a billion pages, and high brand recognition.
-
Also, Amazon is not a local company. It
s a multinational company who does not need to rank on
CITY Keyword`` searches. -
Yes. There are certainly some positives and negatives to having one main larger authoritative site (with link juice from the other sites) Or individual sites with more room for geographic authority as well as a group site.
I cannot decide which strategy to go with.
-
Hello,
I just want to add one thing to what Marty said. If you were to combine all sites under the parent domain and do the steps he suggested, all the traffic would be concentrated under one domain and increase rankability overall. Just ask Amazon how having tons of traffic works out.
-
Yes. Those were my thoughts as well. We wouldn't be able to target as many geographic areas on the main site but can on the individual sites.
Thanks for the great reply!
-
Greetings Samantha,
Combining all your sites into one has several advantages, for example-
- Cutting maintenance, programming and upkeep costs
- Allowing all new trust to flow to one site instead of X sites
- Giving your local dealership pages the trust strength of the main domain
- Brand cohesiveness
Having a main group site with individual locality pages within it is definitely doable from a local ranking perspective. We have a franchise client who has over 50 brick and mortar locations in 3 states and we are able to rank them locally with the same amount of effort you would put into a separate site (from an SEO perspective). You'll want to make sure, at a minimum, you do the following-
- Each dealership has it's own locality page on your site
- The address, phone number, etc. on your locality page exactly matches the same in your Google Places pages
- Link your local Google Places pages to the matching locality page on your website.
- Though not required, I would recommend 301ing your locality websites home, about, contact, etc. to their corresponding locality page (inventory can be 301d to it's appropriate page)
As for a recommendation, I would say do what fits best for you. It seems from what you're saying there are some financial benefits to merging and there are no SEO hurdles to prevent you from doing so. Good luck!
-
"Each site has about the same authority including the group site."
Since they are already setup and working/ranking, why do you want to get rid of them? I'm curious as to how that will help you save money. If the main site links out the the sub sites in a natural fashion, and helps the user find a location closer to them, I would leave it alone, especially if it is a driving factor of business.
Having the sub sites I think will work to your advantage, as you will be able to specifially optimize around that location and geographical area, including all sub towns and local areas.
I am guessing you are trying to increase the authority of the main site by combining them all into one? Perhaps the solution is to leave the sub sites as they are, begin to expand the main site, and link out to the others where it makes the most sense. There is nothing stopping you from expanding the main site just because the mini sites exist.
Another think to think of is the local factor of the mini sites. Each one can have its own LBL (local business listing) tied to it, and linking out or embedding that info on that site. Might help the mini sites have a bit more authority that you might lose be combining them all into one mega site.
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
-
GMB Website Create Competition That Can Hurt Your Own Site?
Hello, Does anyone know if creating a Google My Business website for a business using the GMB builder creates competition for that business's main, non-GMB website? Thanks.
Local Website Optimization | | lawfather0 -
SEO Company wants to rebuild site
Hello Community, I am a designer and web developer and I mostly work with squarespace. Squarespace has SEO best practices built into the platform, as well as developer modes for inserting custom code when necessary. I recently built a beautiful website for a Hail Repair Company and referred them to several companies to help them with SEO and paid search. Several of these companies have told this client that in order to do any kind of SEO, they'll need to completely rebuild the site. I've seen some of the sites these companies have built, and they are tacky, over crowded and hard to use. My client is now thinking they need to have their site rebuilt. Is there any merit to this idea? Or are these companies just using the knowledge gap to swindle people into buying more services? The current site is : https://www.denverautohailspecialists.com/ Any advice would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | arzawacki2 -
Difficulty Ranking Two Locations in the Same City
We are in the self-storage business and have locations through the Pacific Northwest. As we grow, there are cities where we've added multiple (2-3) locations. But we're discovering that we're having a great deal of difficulty ranking for all of these. For instance, we have two locations in Vancouver, WA. One is West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver, and the other is West Coast Self-Storage Padden Parkway. Both are in Vancouver, WA, but for the most part, only West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver is getting ranked. In fact, on those searches where Vancouver ranks, Padden Parkway doesn't show up anywhere. Not in the top 10 pages anyway. Each location has an outer landing page and an inner details page. On each page, we've placed unique, city-optimized keywords in the URL, Page Title, h1s, content. Of course each location has a separate NAP. Each location also has its own GMB page. Each location has a decent amount of reviews across multiple sites (Google, Yelp, GetFiveStars.) Both locations were previously on their own domain until a year ago when they were redirected to their current URLs. Both of those original domains were close to the same age. With the Padden Parkway location, we've tried to be even more hyper-local, by including the address in the URLs and in the h1 of the outer page. We've also created an h2 that references local neighborhoods around the business. We're also running into this situation in at least one other city, so I'm wondering if this has something to do with our url structure. Other businesses in our space use the URL structure of domain.com/state/city/location. We only go down to the state level. What are we missing?
Local Website Optimization | | misterfla0 -
Subdomain vs. Separate Domain for SEO & Google AdWords
We have a client who carries 4 product lines from different manufacturers under a singular domain name (www.companyname.com), and last fall, one of their manufacturers indicated that they needed to move to separate out one of those product lines from the rest, so we redesigned and relaunched as two separate sites - www.companyname.com and www.companynameseparateproduct.com (a newly-purchased domain). Since that time, their manufacturer has reneged their requirement to separate the product lines, but the client has been running both sites separately since they launched at the beginning of December 2016. Since that time, they have cannibalized their content strategy (effective February 2017) and hacked apart their PPC budget from both sites (effective April 2017), and are upset that their organic and paid traffic has correspondingly dropped from the original domain, and that the new domain hasn't continued to grow at the rate they would like it to (we did warn them, and they made the decision to move forward with the changes anyway). This past week, they decided to hire an in-house marketing manager, who is insisting that we move the newer domain (www.companynameseparateproduct.com) to become a subdomain on their original site (separateproduct.companyname.com). Our team has argued that making this change back 6 months into the life of the new site will hurt their SEO (especially if we have to 301 redirect all of the old content back again, without any new content regularly being added), which was corroborated with this article. We'd also have to kill the separate AdWords account and quality score associated with the ads in that account to move them back. We're currently looking for any extra insight or literature that we might be able to find that helps explain this to the client better - even if it is a little technical. (We're also open to finding out if this method of thinking is incorrect if things have changed!)
Local Website Optimization | | mkbeesto0 -
I have a Wordpress site that ranks well and a blog (uses blogger) with slightly different URL/domain that also ranks decently. Should I combine the 2 under the website domain or keep both?
I realize that I am building essentially 2 different sites even though they are connected, but on some local town pages i have 2-3 results on Page #1. Nice problem to have eh? But i am worried as for a lot of my surrounding towns my competitor has the top listing or definitely ahead of me, so i am wondering if i combine or convert my blog into the same domain as my site, then all of that content + links should hopefully propel my site to #1. Anyone have an experience like this? thanks, Chris
Local Website Optimization | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Local SEO - Adding the location to the URL
Hi there, My client has a product URL: www.company.com/product. They are only serving one state in the US. The existing URL is ranking in a position between 8-15 at the moment for local searches. Would it be interesting to add the location to the URL in order to get a higher position or is it dangerous as we have our rankings at the moment. Is it really giving you an advantage that is worth the risk? Thank you for your opinions!
Local Website Optimization | | WeAreDigital_BE
Sander0 -
RE: Keep Losing Keyword Ranking Position for Targeted Keyword Terms Can't Figure It Out, Please Help!!!
Hey Mozzers, I am pulling my hair out trying to figure out why one of my clients keeps losing their SERP for their targeted keyword terms. We're actively pursuing local citations, making sure their NAP is consistent across the board and refining on-page content to make sure that we're maximizing opportunities. The only thing I've found is a 4xx error that my Moz 'crawl diagnostics' keep returning back to me, however, when I check to see if there's any problems with Google Webmaster Tools, it doesn't return any errors. Is this 4xx error the culprit? Are there any suggestions any of you could give me to help me improve the SERP for my targeted keyword terms. Anyway, any and all insight can help. I'm at my wits end. Thanks for reading and for all of your help!
Local Website Optimization | | maxcarnage0 -
Call Tracking, DNI Script & Local SEO
Hi Moz! I've been reading about this a lot more lately - and it doesn't seem like there's exactly a method that Google (or other search engines) would consider to be "best practices". The closest I've come to getting some clarity are these Blumenthals articles - http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/ & the follow-up piece from CallRail - http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/. Assuming a similar goal of using an existing phone number with a solid foundation in the local search ecosystem, and to create the ability to track how many calls are coming organically (not PPC or other paid platform) to the business directly from the website for an average SMB. For now, let's also assume we're also not interested in screening the calls, or evaluating customer interaction with the staff - I would love to hear from anyone who has implemented the DNI call tracking info for a website. Were there negative effects on Local SEO? Did the value of the information (# of calls/month) outweigh any local search conflicts? If I was deploying this today, it seems like the blueprint for including DNI script, while mitigating risk for losing local search visibility might go something like this: Hire reputable call-tracking service, ensure DNI will match geographic area-code & be "clean" numbers Insert DNI script on key pages on site Maintain original phone number (non-DNI) on footer, within Schema & on Contact page of the site ?? Profit Ok, those last 2 bullet points aren't as important, but I would be curious where other marketers land on this issue, as I think there's not a general consensus at this point. Thanks everyone!
Local Website Optimization | | Etna1