Collapsing Location-Specific Subdomains

[ClassicPartyRentals]

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!

[David-Mihm]

My guess is you'll see an improvement in rankings moving to a subfolder structure but a possible decrease in the # of results you get on page one (if the subdomains were ranking there previously).

[Lumina]

My company recently created a website for a huge moving company with many locations. The site's very successful, in part for a few things. Of those, some are pretty conventional:

• Create location-specific pages with unique content about that location - be it your business' location's history, about the town/city, etc. **Do not **allow these pages to be similar to one another. They must have unique, rich content.
• Depending on the amount of locations, you may be able to add those new location-based pages in the footer. I'd say after 20 or so, it might become excessive.
• If you have a blog, you should definitely write about those locations, any new openings, events happening in the areas, etc.
• It should go without saying, but make sure to optimize for each location where appropriate. However, do not over-optimize for any area unless it's the main hub for business.
• Schema. Schema all over the location information.
• Make sure your 301s are organized and all-encompassing.
• Not at all necessary, but occasions like this are great for reviewing your website's design and content.

There's surely a lot more you can do, but this list is a good starting point, I'd say. Hope this helps!