What's your opinion on stores with multiple locations around the country that sell the same products?
-
Is there a way to capture local SEO traffic by only having one website/page for our product pages or do we have to have a website for each location even though the content is identical?
We do have a location finder where we list each location. But we want to generate local traffic in the cities we are in to our product pages through SEO, but it's difficult because they all sell the exact same product. We know Google doesn't like duplicate content.
-
Hi Zachary,
Almost across the board, Local SEOs will recommend the single site approach for the multi-store scenario. Recommend that you check this article out:
http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
...and that you do a close study of how REI.com handles their multi-location business on their website. Especially look at the effort they put into making each location landing page on their website unique. Hope this helps!
-
Hello Zachary,
I would suggest just building out your location pages. Optimize the Title Tag and Meta Description to focus on your keywords and that particular location and then build your content in terms of the location history and information. If the site is strong enough with the products it should rank well for those products and the location should help out with local keywords.
Also make sure that the Google Local Pages are complete verified and are driving reviews and information. If you have multiple physical locations that will also help drive local traffic. In the information section ensure you talk to a degree about your products and services with each location and ensure it is different text.
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
-
Geo-location by state/store
Hi there, We are a Grocery co-operative retailer and have chain of stores owned by different people. We are building a new website, where we would geo-locate the closest store to the customer and direct them to a particular store (selected based on cookie and geo location). All our stores have a consistent range of products + Variation in 25% range. I have few questions How to build a site-map. Since it will be mandatory for a store to be selected and same flow for the bot and user, should have all products across all stores in the sitemap? we are allowing users to find any products across all stores if they search by product identifier. But, they will be able to see products available in a particular store if go through the hierarchical journey of the website. Will the bot crawl all pages across all the stores or since it will be geolocated to only one store, the content belonging to only one store will be indexed? We are also allowing customers to search for older products which they might have bought few years and that are not part of out catalogue any more. these products will not appear on the online hierarchical journey but, customers will be able to search and find the products . Will this affect our SEO ranking? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks - Costa
Local Website Optimization | | Hanuman881 -
Mixed branches / targeting countries results in the SERP
hi all, I have one hard nut to break and I would like to kindly ask you for any idea / help 🙂
Local Website Optimization | | execom99
we have web page localized to multiple languages targetting different countries.
e.g. we have: domain.com/int/ ... default in english, in search console / Internation targeting / Country with Target users in "Unlisted"
domain.com/uk/ ... english for UK, Target users in "United Kingdom"
domain.com/de/ ... german content for Germany, Target users in "Germany"
... etc. Each branch (country specific) has its own sitemap.xml covering approx 50-60% of all the pages for the specific branch and for most of these pages we have set hreflang (rel="alternate") for most important product pages. There are some issues in the sitemaps we are fixing (e.g. no returning link) so my assumption is that google may not use the sitemap, therefore, hreflang is not in use (it is part of sitemap). For example, one branch can have 150 pages submitted and 30 indexed in Sitemap detail of search console. The problem is, that when for example I search for the product name from Germany (google.de and German's IP through VPN in browser's incognito mode) I'm receiving mixed results. Our product names and technology are rather english, e.g. "cloud protection" and it is also phrase German user would search for. But in SERP he gets results from our domain.com/uk and also from our domain.com/sg which is completely wrong. Is there a way to really prevent it ?
thanks
T0 -
Store Locator Apps - Which Do You Use?
Hey Everybody! I'd so appreciate feedback from our web developers and Local SEO wizards here regarding store locator apps (you know - type in a city/zip and get shown the stores nearest you). There are a number of different paid options out there on the market, and a couple of free ones. If you are managing the websites/SEO for multi-location clients, would you share with me which store locator app you chose, why you chose it and how you like it? I am particularly interested in two things about these: Does you app allow you to build a permanent landing page for each store location, including the ability to fully customize the content on that page? In terms of ensuring that these landing pages get crawled, have you used an html sitemap, some type of directory page with crawlable links or some other feature that allows bots to reach the landing pages? Or, if you're not doing any of that, do you believe Google is crawling javascript/ajax/something else to get through your store locator widget to the landing pages? Thanks, in advance, for helping me with my research on this topic!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis0 -
Ideas on creating location based service pages for SEO value while not worrying about local SEO?
Hello and thanks for reading! We have a bit of a rare issue, where we are a nationwide distributor but have a local side that handles all tristate area requests, the sales that happen via local basically don't impact the online side, so we're trying to not focus on local SEO but in a sense worry about abroad local SEO. We want to try the location based service pages, but not for every state, at most 5 states and inside those pages target 2 to 3 big cities. Is this a waste of time to even think about or is this something that can be done with a careful touch?
Local Website Optimization | | Deacyde0 -
Collapsing Location-Specific Subdomains
My client has 24 separate subdomains for its nationwide business, one for each specific location. Much of the content is very similar, as the site serves as a lead-generator for rental reservations. After years of suggesting the approach of using one domain, we have finally gotten the client onboard to eliminating the subdomains and maintaining a subdirectory/page approach for location-specific content and allowing universal content to live at the root domain. I've been looking for any case studies that have any watch-outs or demonstrated benefits when collapsing domestic subdomains (phoenix.client.com; albuquerque.client.com, etc.) into the root, and have been fairly unsuccessful so far. We will be setting up a rigorous 301 redirect tree to ensure we retain as much link juice as possible from any existing subdomain-specific inbound links. Any advice/guidance to help set expectations of what will shake down from this change? It feels like we should see increased domain authority and less cannibalization, as the client ranks nationally for important broad-level keywords, with significantly higher DA at the root level than any tracked competitors, but I'm a little nervous about how localized search results will be affected. Thank you!
Local Website Optimization | | ClassicPartyRentals1 -
Business in one location, be found in others?
Hi all, A bit of an interesting one but I am sure you can all help. My client has a business in a town called location A. Surrounding town A there are several other towns - My client wants to make sure they also appear in SERPs for these surrounding areas, even though their business is not physically located there. E.g. Product town A
Local Website Optimization | | HB17
Product town B
Product town C
Or even just being physically searching from one of those locations and typing the product name, they want to be on that first page. For example if you live in town B which is 20 miles away, my clients still wants to appear right at the top of the SERPs as they are competing against other businesses for that area. They also want to appear for town C, D, and E, all of which are surrounding town A. How can I make this happen? Would I need to create multiple landing pages and focus the SEO on each individual location? I'm just worried Google would see duplicate content but with varied location keywords. I don't have any room left in the page title to add every location. They do legitimately serve these areas, if you are looking for their product there are a few competitors around but this is in their 'territory' so to speak. Any help big or small would be great. Thanks!0 -
Website and eshop with the same product descrition is duplicate content
Hi there! I'm building a website that is divided in a "marketing" and "shop" sections. The 2 sites are being authored by two companies (my company is doing the marketing one). The marketing site has all the company products while the shop will sell just some of those. I'm facing the problem of duplicated content and want to ask you guys if it will be a problem/mistake to use the same product description (and similar url) for the same product in both sites, and the right way to do it (without rewriting product descriptions). the main site will be : www.companyname.com
Local Website Optimization | | svitol
the shop will be: shop.companyname.com thanks
Francesco0 -
Single Site For Multiple Locations Or Multiple Sites?
Hi, Sorry if this rambles on. There's a few details that kind of convolute this issue so I'll try and be as clear as possible. The site in question has been online for roughly 5 years. It's established with many local citations, does well in local SERPs (working on organic results currently), and represents a business with 2 locations in the same county. The domain is structured as location1brandname.com. The site was recently upgraded from a 6-10 page static HTML site with loads of duplicate content and poor structure to a nice, clean WordPress layout. Again, Google is cool with it, everything was 301'd properly, and our rankings haven't dropped (some have improved). Here's the tricky part: To properly optimize this site for our second location, I am basically building a second website within the original, but customized for our second location. It will be location1brandname.com/secondcity and the menu will be unique to second-city service pages, unique NAP on footer, etc. I will then update our local citations with this new URL and hopefully we'll start appearing higher in local SERPs for the second-city keywords that our main URL isn't currently optimized for. The issue I have is that our root domain has our first city location in the domain and that this might have some negative effect on ranking for the second URL. Conversely, starting on a brand new domain (secondcitybrandname.com) requires building an entire new site and being brand new. My hunch is that we'll be fine making root.com/secondcity that locations homepage and starting a new domain, while cleaner and compeltely separate from our other location, is too much work for not enough benefit. It seems like if they're the same company/brand, they should be on the same sitee. and we can use the root juice to help. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | kirmeliux0