"My one suggestion is that you be sure that both cities' pages are accessible from the top level navigation. You mention building a second site within the site."

By second site within the site, I simply meant that once you're at the "home page" for the second location, virtually all of the menu links and content are unique to that location. For example, the root page links to Services > Service 1 which is optimized for Initial Location Services. On the Second Location home, they'd be unique URLs/Pages and would not show the initial locations NAP in the footer or anything.

"I'm not completely sure of what you are envisioning here, but did want to mention that I think it's important that the pages for both city a and city b are accessible from the main menu."

We will definitely have a link to our additional location in the main menu. The home page is a functional WordPress layout for the initial city (which is in the domain name), the menu/homepage will have a link to the additional city (which is the same layout as the main homepage, but with a unique menu and NAP). I definitely plan on having the homepage link to our second location so we can piggyback on the authority/juice of home page.

Wesley,

Thanks for the detailed and informative post. The only thing I'd like to point out is that I'm not referring to building out pages for service areas (although we will do that for a few of them), but an additional "home page" within the site for a city we actually have a location in.

So basically it's quite a bit different than building doorway pages when it's a legit "home page" for our actual location.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the response. I'm thinking keeping the second location on the main site is the answer, although having the initial city in the root URL is kind of skewing my thoughts a bit.

Any opinions on registering the secondcitybrand.com and 301'ing it to the root.com/secondcity URL? It'd look a little cleaner on citation sites and 301's retain the majority of the link juice. I also don't see our company receiving too many "natural" links without us controlling it, so I think we'd be fine on that end (and even so, 301's would be in place). This is probably such a small issue that it doesn't matter either way.

**Also, **The main logo on the WordPress will still link back to the root even on the secondcity sub location. This isn't too problematic is it?

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?