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Hi,

Our company has three branches in Canada and opening a 4th in the United States soon. Our target market strategy will differ in the States and I would like to know your opinion if we should launch a second site under a slightly different brand or not. I don’t want to do anything that could negatively impact our site’s current organic ranks.

I feel I have to give some history on our company so you understand the dilemma. It is a little complicated.

So, in Canada, we rent large generators and all the equipment needed to distribute and transform that power. We don’t own the generators. We re-rent generators (broker) from our partners. What we own is all the distribution equipment that typically accompanies a generator rental. We make money on the generator also, but the real money is in the distribution portion.

In terms of messaging, our current site is tuned to target the end-user, the same market that our re-rent partners target. As a result, our re-rent partners and our company will bid on the same project in many occurrences.

Our strategy in the United States is to primarily target the re-rent market. That is a very small segment in comparison to the end-user. From a marketing perspective, all that is really needed to target that group is an outside sales team. There are maybe 40 re-rent partners we will target in our first U.S. GEO… Texas.

In the States, we will not rent generators. We will not run ad campaigns that bid on any generator rental type terms. We will not offer the same level of turn-key solutions we offer in Canada. All of the equipment we manufacture will be very generic in appearance, think Acme. Branding will look completely different than what we have up in Canada. We want the re-rent companies we target in the States to feel comfortable we are there to support them not compete against them.

Regarding website strategy, I see three options:

1. We create a sub domain or sub page of www.trinitypower.com that explains the services we offer in the States. This for me is the safest solution.

2. We launch a second domain www.trinitypowerrentals.com that has similar content in-terms of the type of equipment we rent, but speaks directly to re-rent partners. That may not be enough of a differentiator though and I fear two sites owned by the same company with similar content will have negative SEO implications, if not right away, a year down the road.

3. We launch a new website under a completely different company name. This still carries some risk as I understand it, even if we have different phone numbers, company registration info, etc…
Would love to know your thoughts.

Thanks everyone.

J

Hello Miriam,

All excellent points.  I will be making some modifications to existing content today and begin writing requirements for separate city landing pages.

Thanks so much,

J

Excellent answer Dirk... thank you.  I will make some tweaks today.

Hi Guys,

This is weird.  When searching "generator rentals" from within Vancouver/Lower Mainland and on a mobile device, our organic listing is ranked #1.  That is the good news.

The bad news is that for some reason the title returend is:  Generator Rentals & Temporary Power Distribution - Edmonton".   The "-Edmonton" is dynamically added, but I have no idea why.  Edmonton is in a completely different province than Vancouver... over 720 miles apart.

The only thing I can think of is that there is some sort conflict with our Google places account.  You see, we do have an Edmonton branch.  I have setup two branches... one for the Coquitlam/Vancouver branch and one for the Edmonton.  And as far as I can tell, both are setup correctly.

A screenshot from my iPhone has been linked (http://imgur.com/9YvyLDB).

Any ideas would be appreciated.  Thank you,

Jarrett

9YvyLDB

Great, thanks for feedback guys, much appreciated.  I was not really that concerned as the Title Google has chosen to use, works.  Nice to know that it is not an issue with the code or a plugin conflict.

Thanks again,

J

Hello,

This is a weird one.  I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

A couple months ago, we updated trinitypower.com and it was back then that I first noticed this issue, but because the home page title tag was okay and contained the primary terms for that page, I told myself I would circle back.

The problem is that even though Google crawls the site everyday, it does not update the title tag text in it's index.

1. Google:  "Trinity Power Rentals" and you will see the title in the index as "Trinity Power:  Temporary Power Rentals".

2. Go to trinitypower.com and view source.  You will see the title tag in the code as "Temporary Power Rentals - Trinity Power"

The desc tag has been updated correctly, but I can't figure out why not the Title tag.  You can look at the cache version in the index of Google.  It is showing the latest version of that tag, so I really do not understand what has happened here.

I am using WP Super Cache... maybe a conflict with that?  I have dumped it's cache numerous times though.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Jarrett

Thanks George, much appreciated.

thanks George,

The menu for the mobile view is quite different... mega menu style. I may go back to pure responsive, but what do you think of this proposed solution from my developer?

"The original menu were responsive. But for new mobile menu, I had to create new separate responsive menu for mobile version. Because I couldn't implement the new design on existing menu. Both menus are same in terms of text but different in terms of tags and structure.

***For the Ajax, the menu will call from other URL and we can disallow this URL to crawl for Google and other Search Engine. So in the text version only one version will be displayed."

It feels like a hack to me and I am concerned about it both being browser compatible moving forward and if there would be any negative impact I can't think of having do to with mobile crawl bots.

Thanks,

Jarrett

Hi,

Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the main menu has been duplicated.

Please see:  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.trinitypower.com&strip=1

Our coder tells me he created one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version.  Duplicating the menu cannot be good for on page SEO.  With that said, I have had no warnings reported back from Moz.  Maybe the moz bots are not tuned to looks for such a duplication error.

Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements.  I did not like the look and feel of the responsive version created based on the desktop version.

Hi solution to this problem is to convert the Mobile version menu into ajax.  what do you guys think?

Thanks,

Jarrett