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
-
Adding Location to Title Tags has dropped SEO Rankings
After adding the suburb of my business to each title tag on my website, I've noticed their rankings have dropped from page one to page four in a lot of cases. Should I wait it out and expect to see them improve in the future? Should I revert them back to their old title tags? I'm a little concerned!
On-Page Optimization | | thomaslutrov0 -
One service - multiple locations
Just started working on a website with 2 services and a LOT of locations... So website is something like categorized in states and subcategories are cities... But it only offers 2 services. So each city out of 100 has one page per service... It seems to me like something not pretty good but I have no experience with such sites. I know that it is ok if you have stores on different locations so you can do local for all them but in this case website owner just wanted to rank high for 100 cities and actually he is doing pretty good... But I somehow think that may cause problems in future and google could consider it as a spam, no matter of unique content on 100 pages when it is actually the same... So if you have any advice for this situation, I am listening 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | m2webs0 -
Duplicate content from pagination and categories found in multiple locations
Hey Moz community, Really need help resolving duplicate content issues for an eCommerce utilizing Magento. We have duplicate content issues with category pagination and categories found in multiple locations. here's an example: "www.website.com/style/sequin-dresses" is also found at "www.website.com/features/sequin-dresses" *to resolve this issue do we just need to place a canonical tag on "www.website.com/features/sequin-dresses" pointing to "www.website.com/style/sequin-dresses"? In addition, the category "Sequin Dresses" also has pagination. to resolve duplicate content issues with pagination do we need to implement a rel=next/prev tag? (we do not have a view-all due to the amount of products featured) If anyone has experience with this or any insights on how to resolve these issues please let me know. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeapOfBelief0 -
Multi channel product descriptions & dupe content issues
Hi When filling in inventory files to upload to the likes of Amazon clients will usually be copying and pasting the product descriptions from the website product descriptions into the Amazon product description field Should they really be re-written to avoid dupe content issues ? I presume not since it is the official description of the product. Please note that i'm talking here about the manufacturers website/product descriptions and their own Amazon shop descriptions. So theirs is the original authoritative description. Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to Handle Multiple Locations
We are working with a client who will have multiple locations––same company, same services [for the most part], different location. They want each location to get picked up locally in the search engines. What is the best way to handle the website and URLs? One overarching website with a page for each location?
On-Page Optimization | | thinkcreativegroup
Separate Company Name with the town in each - "XYZ Company - Orlando"?
Have a separate URL with the town name for each location that points each location's page?
All addresses on each page in the footer? Thanks.0 -
One site, one location, multiple languages - best approach?
Hey folks, Has anyone created a multilingual site targeted at a single location? I have a site that I need to create which is targeting users in Spain. There are going to need to be English and Spanish versions of the text. My thoughts would be to handle it this way: 1. Geolocate the entire site to spain 2. Have the english content in a folder /en/ 3. Have the spanish content in a folder /es/ As far as I am aware the same content in another language is not considered duplicate content and Google should handle folks searching in spanish or english and show them the correct landing page. Sounds easy enough in principle but I also have these other options to seemingly solidify the approach: 4. Add: rel="alternate" hreflang="x" (3) 5. Add language information to a sitemap (4) Again, none of that seems terribly difficult but would welcome any feedback and particularly experience of multilingual sites targeting a single location. Thanks all Marcus References and info 1. Multi Regional:
On-Page Optimization | | Marcus_Miller
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html 2. Multi Language:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html 3. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 4. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=26208650 -
In my report of my website it was indicated that I had 19 links/locations blocked by meta-robots. What does this mean and how do I fix it. My website is a Wordpress website.
In my report of my website it was indicated that I had 19 links/locations blocked by meta-robots. What does this mean and how do I fix it. My website is a Wordpress website.
On-Page Optimization | | cyaindc0 -
Multi-language domain strategy crossroad
I've come to a crossroads with a multilingual domain strategy. Most of you know, Canada has two official languages; English & French. I'm trying to decide on two domain structures to handle languages: 1. Create sub-directory folders for both languages: www.sitename.ca/en/ www.sitename.ca/fr/ Take into account that all page names will be in their respective language. or 2. Create a single sub-directory folder for French only: www.sitename.ca www.sitename.ca/fr/ I'm leaning towards Option #2 because English is our target and want to give those pages more "weight" rather than pushing them down another level (flatter site structure for primary pages). Yes, I could also have all French pages at the root but I think having them a) in one sub-directory is easier to manage and b) SE (specifically Google) likes the division better for languages. I'm just not sure if there's a point to doing it for English too. Note: There'll be several hundred pages for each language. What's best practice (of course) and is there a difference if any....or was this just long winded for nothing? Thanks for any insights.
On-Page Optimization | | Bragg0