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.
Should I open a new domain and website for a new location under one company?
-
Hi my name is Gina and I wanted to ask for some advice. I'm thinking opening a diff location and was thinking if its a good idea to open up a new domain and new website? And why that may be a good idea and why or a bad idea and why?
-
Hi Gayane,
We have a long recent thread on this same topic here, https://moz.com/community/q/does-multiple-sites-that-relate-to-one-company-hurt-seo , which you might like to check out
-
Unless the business locations are franchises and independently run, I'll say keep it all under one domain. Build location landing pages out for the different locations with unique content. Splitting them to separate domains will create more work for you (and the company) to maintain and build the authority. If you use location page silos, then you can keep content and links under one domain and consolidate your efforts. The divide and conquer approach won't work well if you don't have a pretty sizable staff (and budget) to work on both sites simultaneously.
If you keep it all under one powerful domain you can have a setup like:
Homepage > Location 1 (general) > Specialized services for location 1
Homepage > location 2 (general) > specialized services for location 2
That way you're able to capture traffic using each unique location page and more specific traffic for the services. All are sharing a benefit from the homepage authority, and you'd be able to internally link to the other locations so customers can easily find all the business offices. It's a little cleaner than replicating another site on a new domain... plus you need to think about creating all unique content for the other site, and making sure it's optimized... That would be a lot of extra (not needed) work.
Keep it simple - one primary domain, and local landing pages for the new locations.
-
Hi Gayane,
It really comes down to a question of budget. Having a site for each location will allow you to be the most geo-targeted but if you have 5 different locations, that essentially means 5 SEO budgets. 5 lots of content (all having to be completely unique), 5x the link profiles and 5x the monitoring, planning and general campaign management.
In reality, the best option for most of us is to use a single site for all areas. Since Google looks at a lot of domain-wide metrics these days, it means if you're boosting content and links to your Las Vegas page, your LA page is going to benefit from that to an extent as well.
Rather than go into detail with ideas on how to do it, check out Rand's Whiteboard Friday on the topic.
I hope that helps!
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
-
How to Get google to get to index New URL and not the OLD url
Hi Team, We are undertaking a Domain migration activity to migrate our content frrom one domain to another. 1. the Redirection of pages is handeled at Reverse proxy level. 2. We do have 301 redirects put in place. However we still see that google is indexing pages with our Old domain apart from the pages from new domain. Is there a way for us to stop google from indexing our pages from Old domain. The recommendations to have Noindex on Page mete title and disallow does not work since our redirection is setup at RP and google crawlers always discover the new pages after redirection.
Local Website Optimization | | bhaskaran0 -
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 -
Multi location silo seo technique
A physical therapy company has 8 locations in one city and 4 locations in another with plans to expand. I've seen two methods to approach this. The first I feel is sloppy and that is the individual url for each location that points to from the location pages on the main domain. The second is to use the silo technique incorporated with metro scale addition. You have the main domain with the number of silos (individual stores) and each silo has its own content (what they do at each store is pretty much the same). My question is should the focus of each silo, besides making sure there is no duplicate copy, to increase their own hyperlocal outreach? Focus on social, reviews, content curated for the specific location. How would you attack this problem?
Local Website Optimization | | Ohmichael1 -
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 -
Can PPC harm SEO results, even if it's off-domain?
Here's the scenario. We're doing SEO for a national franchise business. We have over 60 location pages on the same domain, that we control. Another agency is doing PPC for the same business, except they're leading people to un-indexable landing pages off domain. Apparently they're also using location extensions for the businesses that have been set up improperly, at least according to the Account Strategists at Google that we work with. We're having a real issue with these businesses ranking in the multi-point markets (where they have multiple locations in a city). See, the client wants all their location landing pages to rank organically for geolocated service queries in those cities (we'll say the query is "fridge repair"). We're trying to tell them that the PPC is having a negative effect on our SEO efforts, even though there shouldn't be any correlation between the two. I still think the PPC should be focused on their on-domain location landing pages (and so does our Google rep), because it shows consistency of brand, etc. I'm getting a lot of pushback from the client and the other agency, of course. They say it shouldn't matter. Has anyone here run into this? Any ammo to offer up to convince the client that having us work at "cross-purposes" is a bad idea? Thanks so much for any advice!
Local Website Optimization | | Treefrog_SEO0 -
Duplicate content question for multiple sites under one brand
I would like to get some opinions on the best way to handle duplicate / similar content that is on our company website and local facility level sites. Our company website is our flagship website that contains all of our service offerings, and we use this site to complete nationally for our SEO efforts. We then have around 100 localized facility level sites for the different locations we operate that we use to rank for local SEO. There is enough of a difference between these locations that it was decided (long ago before me) that there would be a separate website for each. There is however, much duplicate content across all these sites due to the service offerings being roughly the same. Every website has it's own unique domain name, but I believe they are all on the same C-block. I'm thinking of going with 1 of 2 options and wanted to get some opinions on which would be best. 1 - Keep the services content identical across the company website and all facility sites, and use the rel=canonical tag on all the facility sites to reference the company website. My only concern here is if this would drastically hurt local SEO for the facility sites. 2 - Create two unique sets of services content. Use one set on the company website. And use the second set on the facility sites, and either live with the duplicate content or try and sprinkle in enough local geographic content to create some differential between the facility sites. Or if there are other suggestions on a better way to handle this, I would love to hear any other thoughts as well. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | KHCreative0 -
Are there any suggestions when you completly redesign your web page keeping the same domain but change the host? I want it to go smoothly and want to avoid the rankings we already have including sub pages.
I am currently having our website completely redone by a design company. Are there any suggestions on this process as to not lose the rankings we currently have for our site? The domain will remain the same however we are planning on changing our host. We also have a good amount of sub domains that the web company will not be changing for us.
Local Website Optimization | | molchman0 -
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