Best way to do a site in various regions
-
I have a client who has 2 primary services in 4 regions
He does mold removal and water damage repair.
He then serves cincinnati, dayton, columbus, and indianapolis.
Before hiring my company he had like 30 domains (keyword based) and had tons and tons of fake google places listings. He actually got a lot of traffic that way.
However I will not tolerate that kind of stuff and want to do things the right way.
First of all what is the best site approach for this. He wants a site for each service and for each city.
indy mold
cincy mold
dayton mold
dayton water
etc etc etc
In the end he will have 8 sites and wants to expand into other services and regions.
I feel like this is not the right way to handle this as he also has another site that is more generic
To me the best way to do this is a generic domain with a locations page and a page for each city.
The for the Places he would get one account - an address that is hidden since he goes to customer locations, and just multiple city defined regions.
He does have an office like address at each city. So should I make him a Places listing for each city or just the one? And of course how should the actual sites be organized?
Thanks
-
I do wish you luck, Web Feat! Show the client the Google Places Quality Guidelines. Then, it's not just coming from you - it's coming from Google. Also, heads up: Google just changed the language again the guidelines. I wrote about this today, in case you are interested and it might help you in talking with the client:
http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1205
Have a good rest of your weekend!
-
Thanks so much. That is all pretty much what I was thinking. I now get to try to convince the business owners to do things the right way. Wish me luck
-
Hi WebFeat,
You've taken on 2 tough things here - a spammed record and a business owner who may not want to do things correctly. Hopefully, you will be able to help him see the light on this. Let me copy some of your remarks and respond to them individually, please, so that I'm sure I'm covering what you want to know.
Before hiring my company he had like 30 domains (keyword based) and had tons and tons of fake google places listings. He actually got a lot of traffic that way.
Bad, bad, bad. Yes...you can game the system, but this is the type of account that eventually gets banned and getting back into Google's good graces after that can be something even the best Local SEO on earth will be unable to accomplish. The client is in an emergency situation right now. If you can get the record cleaned up before punishment occurs, you're saving his neck.
However I will not tolerate that kind of stuff and want to do things the right way.
Thumbs up for you and 'boo' to the previous company who taught the client to engage in these practices.
In the end he will have 8 sites and wants to expand into other services and regions.
Some business owners do take this approach of having a separate site for each of their cities or services. The main argument for such a practice is that a) the exact match domain name can give a ranking boost and b) links coming into the domain will have matching primary keywords because of the URL. One can choose to do this, but I don't consider it a best practice for several reasons.
The first is that it hints at a single entity being multiple entities, which is not really true. The second is that it makes management (SEO, marketing, webmastering) incredibly complicated. The third is that I believe it is better to build the authority of a single domain with tons of great content and links than to spread this thin like a scrape of butter over a whole loaf of bread. Of these three statements, the last is really just my opinion on this as a Local SEO. It's not proven fact or anything like that, but like you, I just think it's not a best practice. I would advise my own client that if they've got a single legal business, that = a single really authoritative website they can develop.
To me the best way to do this is a generic domain with a locations page and a page for each city.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by a generic domain, but at any rate, I agree with you about a single domain with a landing page for each city and each service. Then, I would build beyond this on the website, perhaps with blogging, covering every service he offers in each city one at a time. This is somewhat akin to the process your client thinks is best - having a different domain for each city and each service in each city, but instead of doing this on a ton of different domains, it's all under one roof, under the name of his business, on a single, powerhouse website.
The for the Places he would get one account - an address that is hidden since he goes to customer locations, and just multiple city defined regions.
He does have an office like address at each city. So should I make him a Places listing for each city or just the one? And of course how should the actual sites be organized?
If the client has a REAL location (and you should be sure of this because what he's told you are locations could turn out just to be virtual offices) in each of his main cities, then yes, he is allowed to have a Place Page for each of his cities. If he has only one legit location, then he should have only one Place Page.
That's good that you're hip to the recent 'hide address' guideline changes. This is still early days with this. My interpretation of the new guideline, at this point, is this:
Type A
Your business is brick-and-mortar and serves all customers at its location. Show your address.Type B
Your business is home-based and serves some customers at your home and some on the road. Show your address and use the Service Radius tool.Type C
Your business is home-based and does not serve any customers at your home. Hide your address.*see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap
You'll need to figure which one of those fits your client's business model. I would also recommend that you read this post on this subject by Mike Blumenthal which points out some of the vagueness of the guidelines that have yet to be adequately resolved by Google:
Google has really done a poor job with clarity on the new guideline. Hopefully, you can figure out the right move for your client on this and he will abide by your advice.
So, bottom line on this is that my professional preference would be for a single domain and whatever number of place pages matches the legitimate offices of the client. I would focus on building out content rather than building out domains.
That being said...if the client has built an empire of domains that are getting him business, it may be necessary to maintain those, but whatever he decides on that, he should be informed that by spamming Google Places he is risking his total visibility in Google. Additionally, if he ends up with just 1-2 Place Pages and 20 domains, it's going to be complicated deciding which URL the legit Place Page/Pages can point to. Again, another reason to put everything in one basket. If he wants to keep the domains, you can go with that, though it's not ideal, but insist on him cleaning up his act in Google Places or tell him you can't work with him as he's heading for a train wreck, sooner or later.
Hope this helps!
Miriam
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
-
Moving site from html to Wordpress site: Should I port all old pages and redirect?
Any help would be appreciated. I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist. My questions are: Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly? I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue. Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.
Technical SEO | | gheh20130 -
Then why my site is not ranking
My website's DA and PAs are good compare with my competitors. Then why my site is not ranking.
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
Best & easiest way to 301 redirect on IIS
Hi all, What is the best and easiest way to 301 redirect URLs on IIS server? I got access to the FTP and WordPress back office, but no access to the server admin. Is there an easy way to create 301 redirect without having to always annoy the tech in charge of the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 2MSens0 -
Image Height/Width attributes, how important are they and should a best practice site include this as std
Hi How important are the image height/width attributes and would you expect a best practice site to have them included ? I hear not having them can slow down a page load time is that correct ? Any other issues from not having them ? I know some re social sharing (i know bufferapp prefers images with h/w attributes to draw into their selection of image options when you post) Most importantly though would you expect them to be intrinsic to sites that have been designed according to best practice guidelines ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Why is this site ranking better than me
Hi just used the compare tool to try and find out why a site is ranking better than me http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.lifestylemonthly.co.uk%2F my site is www.in2town.co.uk and the site i am comparing with is http://www.lifestylemonthly.co.uk/ Can anyone explain what is going on and how i can achieve better ranking results
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How does Google Crawl Multi-Regional Sites?
I've been reading up on this on Webmaster Tools but just wanted to see if anyone could explain it a bit better. I have a website which is going live soon which is going to be set up to redirect to a localised URL based on the IP address i.e. NZ IP ranges will go to .co.nz, Aus IP addresses would go to .com.au and then USA or other non-specified IP addresses will go to the .com address. There is a single CMS installation for the website. Does this impact the way in which Google is able to search the site? Will all domains be crawled or just one? Any help would be great - thanks!
Technical SEO | | lemonz0 -
Site Crawl
I was wondering if there was a way to use SEOmoz's tool to quickly and easily find all the URLs on you site and not just the ones with errors. The site that I am working on does not have a site map. What I am trying to do is find all the URLs along with their titles and description tags. Thank you very much for your help
Technical SEO | | pakevin0 -
Partial Site Move -- Tell Google Entire Site Moved?
OK this one's a little confusing, please try to follow along. We recently went through a rebranding where we brought a new domain online for one of our brands (we'll call this domain 'B' -- it's also not the site linked to in my profile, not to confuse things). This brand accounted for 90% of the pages and 90% of the e-comm on the existing domain (we'll call the existing domain 'A') . 'A' was also redesigned and it's URL structure has changed. We have 301s in place on A that redirect to B for those 90% of pages and we also have internal 301s on A for the remaining 10% of pages whose URL has changed as a result of the A redesign What I'm wondering is if I should tell Google through webmaster tools that 'A' is now 'B' through the 'Change of Address' form. If I do this, will the existing products that remain on A suffer? I suppose I could just 301 the 10% of URLs on B back to A but I'm wondering if Google would see that as a loop since I just got done telling it that A is now B. I realize there probably isn't a perfect answer here but I'm looking for the "least worst" solution. I also realize that it's not optimal that we moved 90% of the pages from A to B, but it's the situation we're in.
Technical SEO | | badgerdigital0