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
-
Google for Jobs: how to deal with third-party sites that appear instead of your own?
We have shared our company's job postings on several third-party websites, including The Muse, as well as putting the job postings on our own website. Our site and The Muse have about the same schema markup except for these differences: The Muse...
Local Website Optimization | | Kevin_P
• Lists Experience Requirements
• Uses HTML in the description with tags and other markup (our website just has plain text)
• Has a Name in JobPosting
• URL is specific to the position (our website's URL just goes to the homepage)
• Has a logo URL for Organization When you type the exact job posting's title into Google, The Muse posting shows up in Google for Jobs--not our website's duplicate copy. The only way to see our website's job posting is to type in the exact job title plus "site:http://www.oursite.com". What is a good approach for getting our website's posting to be the priority in Google for Jobs? Do we need to remove postings from third-party sites? Structure them differently? Do organic factors affect which version of the job posting is shown, and if so, can I assume that our site will face challenges outranking a big third-party site?1 -
Site Audit: Indexed Pages Issue
Over the last couple of months I've been working through some issues with a client. One of my starting points was doing a site Audit. I'm following a post written by Geoff Kenyon https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 . One of the main issues of the site audit seems to be that when I run a "site:domain.com" query in Google my homepage isn't the first page listed in fact it isn't listed in this search when I go through all of the listings. I understand that it isn't required to have your homepage listed first when running this type of query, but I would prefer it. Here are some things I've done I ran another query "info:homepage.com" and the home page is indexed by Google. When I run a branded search for the company name the home page does come up first. The current page that is showing up first in the "site:domain.com" listing is my blog index page. Several months back I redirected the index.php page to the root of the domain. Not sure if this is helping or hurting. In the sitemap I removed the index.php and left only the root domain as the page to index. Also all interior links are sent to the root, index.php has been eliminated from all internal links everything links to root The main site navigation does not refer to the "Home" page, but instead my logo is the link to the Home page. Should I noindex my blog/index.php page? This page is only a compilation of posts and does not have any original content instead it actually throws up duplicate content warnings. Any help would be much appreciated. I apologize if this is a silly question, but I'm getting frustrated/ annoyed at the whole situation.
Local Website Optimization | | SEO_Matt0 -
Does multiple sites that relate to one company hurt seo
I know this has been asked and answered but my situation is a little different. I am a local electrical contractor. I specialize in a service and not a product. Competition is high in the local market due to the other electrical contractors that have well seasoned sites with very good DA/PA. Although new to the web I am not new to the trade. Throughout years almost back to the AOL dialup days I have been collecting domain names for this particular purpose. Now I want to put them to good use. Being an electrical contractor, there are many different facets of work and services we provide. My primary site is empireelec.com A second site I threw online overnight with minimal content is jacksonvillelightingrepair.com. Although it is a fresh site, there is minimal content and I have put almost zero effort in to it. It appears to be ranking for keywords a lot quicker. That leads me to believe I should utilize my other domain jacksonvillefloridaelectrician.com and target just the keyword Jacksonville Florida Electrician. It leads me to believe I should use jacksonvillebeachelectrician.com for targeting electricians in jacksonville beach. And again with jacksonvilleelectricianservice.com I can provide a unique phone number for each site. Am I going about this all wrong? Everything I read says no,no,no but I feel my situation is a little more unique.
Local Website Optimization | | empireelec1 -
Understand how site redesign impacts SEO
Hi everyone, I have, what I think, is kind of a specific question, but hoping you guys can help me figure out what to do. I have a client that recently changed their entire website (I started working with them after it happened, so I can't comment on what the site was like as far as content was before). I know they were using a service that I see a lot of in the service industry that aim to capitalize on local business (i.e. "leads nearby" or "nearby now") by creating pages for each targeted city and I believe collecting reviews for each city directly on the website. When they redesigned their website, they dropped that service and now all those pages that were ranking in SERPs are coming back as 404s because they are not included in the new site (I apologize if this is getting confusing!) The site that they moved to is a template site that they purchased the rights to from an already successful company in their same industry, so I do think the link structure probably changed, especially with all of the local pages that are no longer available on the site. Note: I want to use discretion in using company names, but happy to share more info in a private message if you'd like to see the sites I am talking about as I have a feeling that this is getting confusing 🙂 Has anyone had experience with something like this? I am concerned because even though I am targeting the keywords being used previously to direct content to the local pages to new existing pages, traffic to the website has dropped by nearly 60% and I know my clients are going to want answers-- and right now, I only have guesses. I am really looking forward to and so greatly appreciate any advice you might be able to share, I'm at a bit of a loss right now.
Local Website Optimization | | KaitlinNS0 -
Best practices for 301 redirect to a new location website.
We just opened a new location in a nearby city. We were already servicing this location from our main base. As such we had a special page for this location which raked fairly well. The new location will have its own website. Would it be better to 301 redirect the current location page to the new location website? Or should we simply link from the old page to the new location's website? Any best practices?
Local Website Optimization | | Vspeed0 -
Can to many 301 redirects damage my Ecommerce Site - SEO Issue
Hello All, I have an eCommerce website doing online hire. We operate from a large number of locations (100 approx) and my 100 or so categories have individual locations pages against them example - Carpet Cleaners (category) www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC12
carpet cleaner hire Manchester www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners/Manchester
carpet cleaner hire london
carpet cleaner hire Liverpool patio heater (category)
patio heater hire Manchester
patio heater hire London
patio heater hire Liverpool And so on..... I have unique content for some of these pages but given that my site had 40,000 odd urls, I do have a large amount of thin/duplicate content and it's financially not possible to get unique
content written for every single page for all my locations and categories. Historically, I used to rank very well for these location pages although this year, things have dropped off and recently , I was hit with the Panda 4.0 update which i understand targets thin content. Therefore what I am int he process of doing is reducing the number of locations I want to rank for and have pages for thus allowing me to achieve both a higher percentage of unique content over duplicate/thin content on the whole site and only concerntrate on a handful of locations which I can realistically get unique content written for. My questions are as follows. By reducing the number of locations, my website will currently 301 redirect these location page i have been dropping back to it's parent category.
e.g carpet cleaner hire Liverpool page - Will redirect back to the parent Carpet cleaner hire Page. Given that I have nearly 100 categories to do , this will mean site will generate thousands of 301 redirects when I reduce down to a handful of locations per category. The alternative Is that I can 404 those pages ?... What do yout think I should do ?.. Will it harm me by having so many 301's . It's essentially the same page with a location name in it redirecting back to the parent. Some of these do have unqiue content but most dont ?. My other question is - On a some of these categories with location pages, I currently rank very well for locally although there is no real traffic for these location based keywords (using keyword planner). Shall I bin them or keep them? Lastly , Once I have reduced the number of location pages , I will still have thin content until , I can get the unique content written for them. Should I remove these pages until that point of leave them as it is? It will take a few months
to get all the site with unique content. Once complete, I should be able to reduce my site down from 40,000 odd pages to say 5,000 pages Any advice would be greatly appreciated thanks
Pete0 -
Multilingual site making new URLs, how to preserve SEO juice?
Hello! My site currently serves content in german and english, however without having separate URLs (it depends on Accept-Language and has a submitform for changing language based on set cookies). The site appears extremely well in the search engine, with many keywords ranking at #1-10. They appear on the german and english google search, with the first one bringing the best results. It's however the english site that appears in the results. I want to change to a better approach by having subdirectories for each language, as I'm extending the site, I know how to do this but I have found -nowhere- any infos on how to preserve my search engine ranks? If I keep the english version as homepage and send german visitors to /de/, might this kill my position in the german search engine which is very important, as the new frontpage under /de/ would become more relevant and the english one maybe less? Or should I keep the german version the default one and send english visitors elsewhere? What happens with my search positions, if I have no side on the / but visitors are always send to either /en/ or /de/? Every help is greatly appreciated, as I found a lot of articles everywhere on how to make a multilingual site, but nowhere anything on how it affects current search results.
Local Website Optimization | | innovacy0 -
Meta tags not dead? Is this keeping me hidden?
I am not sure if it makes a difference, but when I called Google Places on Monday to edit my business address, I asked if the support person could see any penalties against my site. They said no. I asked because of my berneseoftherockies.com website is non existent. Now I have been working with removing 10 foreign backlinks, so not sure if even one bad backlink can cause a site to not come up, thus causing a penalty. I mean for bernese mountain dogs in Colorado is a small niche, but I am no where to be found. But they did say that they did not see any meta tags. I responded with I was under the impression that Google does not use meta tags. This rep stated, they would use them. So did they give me some secret? When I Googled my main keyword, I noticed out of the top 10 listings, they all used meta keywords, except for one. Could this be keeping me out of the rankings? Thank you for your toughts
Local Website Optimization | | Berner0