Ecommerce Site Structure -- "/our_locations" page: helpful or harmful?
-
Hello!
We are a retailer with brick and mortar stores in different cities. We have a website (ourbusiness.com), which includes
- a blog (ourbusiness.com/blog) and
- a separate ecommerce site for each store in subfolders (ourbusiness.com/Boston-store and ourbusiness.com/Atlanta-store).
- NB: We do this for non-business reasons and have no choice.
So, this is not like REI (for example) or other stores with lots of locations but one central ecommerce operation.
Most experts seem to recommend a site structure that echoes REIs. IE:
- a home page principally devoted to ecommerce (rei.com)
- includes an Our Locations-type page (rei.com/stores) which links to local store pages like
- (rei.com/stores/fresno)
I understand how this would help REI, since their homepage is devoted to ecommerce and they need a store locator page that doesn't compete with the shopping experience. But since we can't send people to products directly from our home page, is there any reason for us not to put the store locator function right on the home page?
That is, is there any reason in our case to prefer (A) ourbusiness.com/our_locations/Boston_store over (B) ourbusiness.com/Boston-store?
As i see it, the extra page (/our_locations/) could actually hurt, as it puts products one click further away from customers, and one link deeper for bots.
On the other hand, it may make the multi-store structure clearer to bots (and maybe people) and help us in local search.
Finally, would it make a difference if there were 10 stores vs 2?
Thanks for any thoughts!
-
Hi there!
I do not have any resource or study for those statements.
- for the extra clic, it a well known fact that, for any extra clic that the user does, the conversion rate decreases.
- On how usefull is that landing hub, it is something to be experimented in your case. Theoretically it helps, but its really difficult to estimate how much.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR -
Thanks for the response. I think you boiled it down to the basic questions very nicely.
If you have any research you can point me to to help me understand just how useful the extra page might be to google bot, or (on the other hand) how much traffic we may lose to the extra click, i'd be most grateful for a pointer.
thanks again!
-
Hi there,
On one hand, my opinion, its a little helpful to GoogleBot, having that folder stating that you have several stores.
So I'd go with A: ourbusiness.com/stores/locationOn the other hand, there is no need to increase an extra click to users, all links could be directly to the stores and not making the users to choose. Also, that extra folder, could be used as an internal link page (also called, landing HUB) were you link all your stores. This would also help a little to GoogleBot.
On a third hand, there is no way to forecast how much your traffic will improve. So analyze and take into consideration how much time and effort you and your dev team need for this improvement.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR
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
-
Local Site Linking to Corporate Site In Main Menu - Bad for SEO?
Hi, We have 'local' websites for different countries (UK, DE, FR, AP, US etc.) and a corporate website, the local websites are going to be linking back to the corporate website in the main menu (think about us, terms and conditions kind of pages). Any local products will have their own pages on the local website but global products will be linked back to the corporate website. We will be placing an indication the user will be going to another website next to those menu links that go to the corporate website. Is there any drawback to this for SEO? Should we use nofollow in the menu structure of regional websites for these links? Thanks for your help.
Local Website Optimization | | UNIT40 -
Help choosing ideal URL structure
Hi All, We are considering changing the link structure for the website of a large restaurant group, which represents about 100 restaurants in the USA. While I have some opinions, I'd very much welcome the opinions of some other seasoned SEO's as well. There are two options on the table for the link structure, which you can see below. The question is for restaurants with multiple locations, and how we structure those URLs. The main difference is whether we include the "/location/" of the URL, or if that is overkill? I suppose maybe it could have some value if someone is searching a term like "Bub City Location", with "location" right in the search. But otherwise, it just adds to the length of the URL, and I'm not sure if it'll bring any extra value... In this example, "bub-city" is the restaurant name, and "mb-financial-park" is one of the locations. Option A
Local Website Optimization | | SMQ
http://leye.local/restaurant/bub-city
http://leye.local/restaurant/bub-city/location/mb-financial-park/ Option B
http://leye.local/restaurant/bub-city
http://leye.local/restaurant/bub-city/mb-financial-park/ Thoughts?0 -
How to approach SEO for a national website that has multiple chapter/location websites all under different URLs
We are currently working with a client who has one national site - let's call it CompanyName.net, and multiple, independent chapter sites listed under different URLs that are structured, for example, as CompanyNamechicago.org, and sometimes specific to neighborhoods, as in CompanyNamechicago.org/lakeview.org. The national umbrella site is .net, while all others are .orgs. These are not subdomains or subfolders, as far as we can tell. You can use a search function on the .net site to find a location near you and click to that specific local website. They are looking for help optimizing and increasing traffic to certain landing pages on the .net site...but similar landing pages also exist on a local level, which appear to be competing with the national site. (Example: there is a landing page on the national .net umbrella site for a "dog safety" campaign they are doing, but also that campaign has led to a landing page created independently on the local CompanyNameChicago.org website, which seems to get higher ranking due to a user looking for this info while located in Chicago.) We are wondering if our hands are tied here since they appear to be competing for traffic with all their localized sites, or if there are best practices to handle a situation like this. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | timfrick0 -
Need Help: Trouble With Website and Analytics
Hey all, I have a client who I have been having the WORST time getting traffic and ranked for relevant keywords. I've tried so many things and have yet to see much progress after about 9 months. Site is mgmcdallas.com. I realized something REALLYY weird with this site a couple weeks ago. The business has a Dallas, TX address and really only services the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area. They recently started getting some of referral traffic from yelp.com/biz_redir. Weirdly, they've also been getting more sales calls and more salespeople filling out their contact form. Take January for example, they had 164 sessions and 119 of those were from this yelp referral. They DON'T advertise with Yelp, or get traffic from Yelp anywhere in Texas. You can see from below screenshot that they are all coming from California. analytics I've had our <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> and developer look into and we can't figure out what's happening. Any thoughts? iubnZdu
Local Website Optimization | | BWrightTLM0 -
Is it okay for my H3 Tag to appear above my H2 Tag on the Web Page
Hello All, I am currently doing my H1 ,H2, H3 Tags on my redesigned website We have the ability to have links to relevant DIY Guides on the bottom of our webpage and these are currently displayed under a heading "DIY Useful Guides" above my on page content which is at the bottom of the page. My H2 Tag will obviously be the title that sits above my On Page Content at the bottom of the Webpage and I was going to do the H3 Tag for my DIY Guides Is it a problem if the H3 tag sits above the H2 Tag on the Page or not ? Or have i got this wrong and I need to move the DIY Guides (links) to below the on page content so the H3 tag sits below the H2 tag? thanks Pete OTmPbbR
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Google Structured Data Verses Yandex Structured Data Validator Query
Hi All, We have implemented Schema.org on our website and we have chosen a specific schema as opposed to just using the standard localbusiness. When we ran it through the Google Structured data tool it did not report any error , however , when we tried it on Yandex, it showed up as us having problems with the way we have tagged our addresses for our different locations so we have made additional changes to fix this. I have read somewhere that the Google Structured data tool is not 100% correct at showing any errors etc and that one should use Yandex as well for validation. I am wondering what others thoughts and if what I read should be taken as correct infomation?... I would be surprised if google did release something like the structured data validator if it wasn't as good at reporting than some others out there. thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Merging two pages into one - bad seo done previously
Hi, I have two pages Page 1
Local Website Optimization | | Syed_Ozair
/stop-smoking-hypnotherapy.php
Page authority: 24 and Page 2
/stop-smoking-in-highgate-north-london-radlett-hertfordshire-and-city-of-london.php
Page authority: 13 with 2 internal links only This was probably done to get more local searches to the page but i think it is a bit spamy. Would it be better to 301 page 2 to page 1 or make it as a blog post and keep it alive?0 -
Killing it in Yahoo/Bing...Sucking it in Google. What gives?
Our website http://www.survive-a-storm.com has historically performed well in Google for the search terms "storm shelters" and "tornado shelters." Our geographic focus is nationwide, but we are particularly interested in ranking up for Oklahoma. Right now we are hovering at about the third position in Yahoo/Bing, and in some geographic areas (i.e., as selected in Google's search settings) we are doing reasonably to quite well for these terms in Google (i.e., first page). In Oklahoma, though, we are holding steady around positions 20-25. We have just changed the title tag on our home page, cleaned up a bit of on-page optimization, and are going to work on getting some more optimized content on the page. We are outperforming the competition on Domain Authority (38) and Page Authority (46), and as far as I can tell, other key metrics are respectable. Our social isn't bad, but could always use improvement--which we are working on. Any idea why we might be lagging so badly in Google? Any help would be appreciated!
Local Website Optimization | | Survive-a-Storm0