Multi-Locations Business Internet Presence
-
We are at a crossroad and it's time to decide which direction to travel. We had 4 physical locations represented by 3 websites, August 1st we now have 6 addresses and are going to redesign our websites. Heritage Printing .com is our primary and does very well in DC for printing & signage. Heritage Printing Charlotte .com does well in NC for signs.
How would you proceed?
- Build 2 more websites for a total of 5: Heritage Custom Signs & Heritage Custom Signs DC .coms
- Build a unified site under Heritage Printing .com (w/ subdomains or locations folders)
I fear losing our Internet Presence and Page Rank w/ Google by unifying but also fear fueling the ever growing fragmentation of our brand. FYI: We recently Trade Marked Heritage Printing & our logo
So fellow Mozzers, what do you recommend and how would you proceed?
TY in advance
KJr
-
Hi Kevin!
I apologize for not noticing your thread earlier. Don't know how I missed it!
You are describing so well what happens when a multi-site approach begins to get out of hand. While you could, of course, run 5 different websites, the long term health of the brand is likely going to be best served by consolidation, with proper redirects being set up from the old sites to the new umbrella site, and citations being corrected to reflect the change of URL. You'll likely want to dedicate good resources to earning some new links, while you're at it, to the main site, to strengthen your hand, and a dedicated review acquisition campaign would be smart to throw into this mix, too.
Could you lose rankings? Yes, it's possible, but you can mitigate this as much as possible with proper redirects.
The major benefit of consolidation will be that, going forward, every single action you take will go to strengthening the brand, rather than you having to slice that up 5 different ways. Your goal will be to become the dominant player in your city for everything you do with an incredibly powerful website backed up with a unified marketing plan.
I do recommend going with folders rather than subdomains. It's simpler.
Hoping you'll get some other opinions from our community, and that this one helps. Wishing you luck in the work ahead!
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
-
Duplicate Title Tags/Meta Tags for Website with Multiple Locations
I currently have an insurance website that has over 40 offices in Ontario. The site also provides online quoting.
On-Page Optimization | | MainstreamMktg
In some of our programming, we have implemented variables in the URLS that will allow the quotes to go to the specific city offices - the issue I am having is that the quote in itself is the same quote form (same title, same meta) because it's technically one page on the website. We did it this way to avoid having to update 40 forms if a field on the form were to change. Is there any way I can relieve my site of this duplicate title tag/meta tag issue? Any insight would be really appreciated - thanks so much!0 -
Multi Keyword URL Ranking at Number 1
Here is part of a URL that takes the local number 1 spot for "implant dentist glasgow" [website] /implant-dentistry-glasgow-scotland/implant-dentistry-glasgow-scotland.html The first /implant-dentistry-glasgow-scotland/ directory or page is protected and presumably just exists for ranking reasons. I am tempted to copy that URL on a client's implant page to compete for the keyword (I believe I have better content). Given that it works well for the other site, can you think of any reason that would that be a bad idea? Thanks very much.
On-Page Optimization | | neilmac0 -
Hi can anyone help me with navigating through my business admin page? having a little trouble. Many Thanks
It looks like this... The person that created it has put the term "Hand painted ceramics from spain - inspired ceramica" on every page title and i cant find where it is to delete it. If anyone can help that will be a real help. Many Thanks, Robbie oOU4YDY
On-Page Optimization | | allenr120 -
How Much Does a Missing www. 301 redirect hurt a business?
We're preparing a report for a potential client, and are trying to figure out a way to estimate rankings gains. One of the major issues is a lack of a 301 redirect for non-www. domains to www. domains. We checked and there's no canonicalization, so it's a clear issue. According to Google, the non-www. links from 8 different domains. The www. version of the website has links from 248 different domains. Nearly all anchor text is branded, as they've never had any SEO work done before. Does anyone have a suggestion for approximating benefits of setting up their .htaccess file correctly? Would the benefits even be that great? We're of course advising additional things, but we just want to be more certain about this step's SEO-boost.
On-Page Optimization | | FlynnZaiger0 -
SEO Location Pages - ALT Image Tag Question
Hello Guru's, I have a Hire Website whereby you can rent products online. I have created different Location pages for these which are in essence the same pages page but with different location specific urls, title tags , on page content etc etc. This helps me to rank for local search. These location pages also display 20 products per page. My question is Should I make the ALT IMAGE TEXT location specific for each of the 20 products . Example - Steam Cleaner Rental in "location" or should I only amend a few of the Atl Image Texts to be location specific. I don't want to come accross as spammy in google eyes but I also don't want to be seen as having duplicate content , images etc etc What do you think ? thanks Sarah.
On-Page Optimization | | SarahCollins0 -
Schema business address - can this affect me in the national rankings
Looking at using Schema microdata on our new website, we currently rank quite decently in Google UK. If I was to add schema mark up for our business address could this effect us in Google UK rankings wise i.e. our rankings for national search (for want of a better word!) suffer but our local rankings increase?
On-Page Optimization | | Jon-C0 -
Locating Duplicate Pages
Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index. Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Location in keyword terms
I'm optimizing a website for a dentist and I'm looking for the best approach to incorporating the location into the keyword terms. For example if a dental practice in Boston has a page on Cosmetic Dentistry what would be the best approach for optimizing for "Boston Cosmetic Dentist", "Boston Teeth Whitening" and "Cosmetic Dentist in Boston"? How should I handle the repetition of the location name? Will I get the best results by using the full keyword terms several times on the page "example a" or will "example b" provide similar results? Title Tag: a) Boston Cosmetic Dentist | Boston Teeth Whitening | Cosmetic Dentist in Boston
On-Page Optimization | | OptioPublishing
b) Boston Cosmetic Dentist | Teeth Whitening H1
a) Boston Cosmetic Dentist | Boston Teeth Whitening | Cosmetic Dentist in Boston
b) Boston Cosmetic Dentist | Teeth Whitening keywords to sprinkle through content
a) Boston Cosmetic Dentist, Boston Teeth Whitening, Cosmetic Dentist in Boston
b) Boston Cosmetic Dentist, Teeth Whitening etc... It's important to rank for all 3 keywords but the pages would be flooded with the words Dentist and Boston if I use each phrase exactly. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance,
Jason0