Hey everyone! What methods are best to use for SEO campaigns working with 1 website for a company which has 2, 3, 4, or more locations in order to get keywords for their services to rank well... in all their location cities?

I feel we know the answer could be any one of the below notes, however, it's always nice to learn more about what all you other SEO's are doing or have done which saw success.

Please note:

We have heard about building microsites on sub-domains example city.domainname.com/keyword-or-service
We have heard about building sections off the root domain such as domainname.com/city/keyword-or-service
We have heard about just pushing more content to the blog which can target a wider range of keywords and cities
We have heard about building a new site for each city location replicating the main website and swapping out content for 100% originality
We have heard about just building more and more backlinks with different anchor text using the cities in the anchor text

Thanks in advance and look forward to hearing from some other experts facing these same challenges!

Thanks, Francisco. I could've elaborated a bit more, you're right. We have several clients and prospective clients with multiple locations and most sell the same services/products across each location. However, some, take for example, a General Dentist we work with has 2 offices in different cities, one office does General and Cosmetic Dentistry while the other  does General Dentistry and Oral Surgery. So a little different in what we'd need to target. We always do Google+ verifications as well, so that's not an issue. However, your other points are pretty valid and we have them marked down to implement. Thank you again for your feedback!

Hi Ruben! And Happy Friday to you, too!

It's never a bad idea to republish or update a blog post. We done it before and not really seen any adverse affects to anything we are doing. Before we went through that process (and before we had a Moz account) we hit the search engines and read articles about how to handle old content or to add to older posts.

As some references and reading enjoyment, take a look at Hubspot's post here "The Complete Guide to Updating and Republishing Outdated Blog Content" and also Entrepreneur.com had a recent article I bookmarked on this subject a couple months ago, "Your Blog's Secret Weapon: Old Content". As many industries change, so will the content, so going back to republish or update an article is a wise decision to keep your content as relevant as possible AND with Google being keen on displaying the best results, your old content won't have a chance if the information isn't accurate to the times.

Hope this was helpful! Cheers - Patrick

Hi bchilders22,

Great question and hope I can add to the discussion points. I'd like to approach from 2 angles:

1. To answer your question directly, assuming your goal is to optimize the website (no matter the industry), then yes your SEO ranking will suffer with a lack of content on the Home page. Just like everyone else has stated. If your goal is to optimize the site for other keywords outside of the brand/company name, then the content on the Home page becomes extremely important. If you are seeking to optimize the brand, then you may not be in so much trouble. BUT, if that is your goal, then I would recommend a couple minor items to implement to help. Create a paragraph on the Home page which hits the branded name, maybe placed just above the Footer under the Slider. Use that as your foundation and then create your Title and Description to be relevant to that content, again tagging/referencing your brand and location to coincide with your Schema markup. If you want to hit more keywords, then you'll need more content and maybe focus to section off the content. For example, if this is a restaurant, then hit on sections of the menu or meal time frames ie: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Drinks, etc. Then link to those inner pages.

2. I'm only stating this because we have several clients with ZERO content on the Home page. It's exactly as you mentioned. Social media buttons, logo, large slider, address and navigation tabs. This is all great because these clients do not care a thing about SEO and investing in SEO. They are shopping centers and their brand is very strong, so keeping the Home page clean and simple and directing their visitors to their Directory and Map and Events is their main focus.

In conclusion, it's all about what your client wants. If they want to rank, then get some good, original content on the Home page and tagged appropriately. If they are focusing their efforts on having a cool Home page to highlight their logo/brand and some nice images, then having content may be "too much clutter" for their tastes. Looking at it from both perspectives, it's asking those questions upfront before the design and development begin are highly important.

Hope this was helpful! - Patrick

To answer your question bluntly. Nope!

For $10K, you could get a lot more for your money and would be a longer term investment. Your link on that PR9 site wouldn't be on the Home page the whole time, which I assume carries the highest PageRank. You would eventually fall into an inner page carrying much lower PageRank OR, worse, you get bumped from the site altogether.

Better ways to invest that same amount in organic SEO efforts. Fun question to start my day!

• Patrick