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Much appreciated... Can you see the reply above I sent to Mike and offer your thoughts?

Thanks, Mike. I agree with your reply, but I suppose my main concern is more associated with whether or not our site becomes too convoluted as we begin geo-targeting states and the major cities within them. It would seem to be an organizational nightmare, making sure that users are getting the experience they expect when visiting the site. Users in New Mexico don't care about Indiana law, copy, and vice-versa. There are so many topics related to specific states, and there's so much content, I worry about it becomes haphazzrd when restricted to one domain. Thoughts?

Hi Gang,

Our law firm has offices in the states of Indiana, Michigan, and New Mexico. Each state is governed by unique laws, and each state has its own "flavor," etc.

We currently are set up with the main site as:

http://www.2keller.com (Indiana)

Subdomains as:

http://michigan.2keller.com (Michigan)

http://newmexico.2keller.com (New Mexico)

My client questions this strategy from time to time, and I want to see if anyone can offer some reassurance of which I haven't thought.

Our reason for setting up the sites in this manner is to ensure that each site speaks to state-specific practice areas (for instance, New Mexico does nursing home abuse, whereas the other states don't, etc.) and state-specific ethics law (for instance, in some states you can advertise your dollar amount recoveries, and others you can't.) There are so many differences between each state that the content would seem to warrant it.

Local citations and listings are another reason these sites are set up in such a fashion. The firm is a member of several local state directories and memberships, and by having these links go directly to the subdomain they reference, I can see this being another advantage.

Also, inside each state there are separate pages set up for specific cities. We geo-target major cities in each state, and trying to do all of this under one domain for 3 different states would seemingly get very confusing, very quickly.

I had thought of setting up the various state pages through folders on the main domain, but again, there is too much state specific info to make this seem like a logical approach. Granted the linking and content creation would be easier for one site, but I don't think we can accomplish this in a clean way with the offices being in such different locales?

I guess I'm wondering if there are some things I'm overlooking here?

Thanks guys/gals!

Hi Gang,

Our law firm has offices in the states of Indiana, Michigan, and New Mexico. Each state is governed by unique laws, and each state has its own "flavor," etc.

We currently are set up with the main site as:

http://www.2keller.com (Indiana)

Subdomains as:

http://michigan.2keller.com (Michigan)

http://newmexico.2keller.com (New Mexico)

My client questions this strategy from time to time, and I want to see if anyone can offer some reassurance of which I haven't thought.

Our reason for setting up the sites in this manner is to ensure that each site speaks to state-specific practice areas (for instance, New Mexico does nursing home abuse, whereas the other states don't, etc.) and state-specific ethics law (for instance, in some states you can advertise your dollar amount recoveries, and others you can't.) There are so many differences between each state that the content would seem to warrant it.

Local citations and listings are another reason these sites are set up in such a fashion. The firm is a member of several local state directories and memberships, and by having these links go directly to the subdomain they reference, I can see this being another advantage.

Also, inside each state there are separate pages set up for specific cities. We geo-target major cities in each state, and trying to do all of this under one domain for 3 different states would seemingly get very confusing, very quickly.

I had thought of setting up the various state pages through folders on the main domain, but again, there is too much state specific info to make this seem like a logical approach. Granted the linking and content creation would be easier for one site, but I don't think we can accomplish this in a clean way with the offices being in such different locales?

I guess I'm wondering if there are some things I'm overlooking here?

Thanks guys/gals!