Best way to help a city-centric service provider market in new nearby territories?
-
Our client recently acquired new county territories outside the main area city. We could create separate location pages under the primary domain, but are wondering if micro sites with unique content (and location-including url) that links back to the location pages would also be a good idea.
There is some traction for certain location-based keywords in those areas.
Better to focus on the one domain, or augment with separate websites in different parts of the state? I can come up with plausible reasons for and against either, but would love your thoughts.
Thank you for any insight!
-
Hi Perfect Pitch Concepts,
Bede has pretty much said it all in his awesome response!
I'll only add, as you build out those new pages on your website, make maximum effort to make them totally unique and helpful to the user. Don't take the shortcut of publishing duplicate or thin pages. Find great things to write about regarding your client's involvement in his new service areas.
-
Thank you, Bede. We share your concerns and appreciate your articulating them so thoughtfully.
-
I would go with one site that has location pages for the following reasons:
- You'll probably be starting with fresh domains for your micro sites. If you use the existing site, you'll have some DA built up, which will assist your subpages. You're basically going to be counting on the fact that the location including URL is going to be a big part of getting ranked, and I'm not sure how that would play out long-term, especially given the recent(ish) EMD changes.
- I'd imagine the micro sites won't be providing any value for your customer that you couldn't provide with the main site. Why make them change sites to learn about the company? When I'm searching for products or services and see this, I get just a little bit more suspicious about the company, which makes the sale harder.
- Even with your unique content, your microsites are probably going to be fairly light on content (e.g. just a few pages) if they're all linking back to the same place, it might seem like you're gaming the system for backlinks.
- You probably don't have an easy way of handling your NAP data on all of these different sites. Duplicate local listings suck if they get generated accidentally.
- And, probably the biggest one for me - if you stick with one site, and get your internal structure right, link building efforts for any of the location pages (or the main page) are going to benefit the other subpages as well, so you get more bang for your buck. That's more sustainable in the long run.
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
-
Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing
I keep on hear that Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing is the future in coming years but i would like to know what does it mean exactly , if i want to become expert in Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing then what should i learn or practice? can some send me some reference guides.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inventateq0 -
What to do about new meta description character limit?
Hey Everyone, So as I'm sure everyone has heard the new meta description limits have been increased and I have been going back and forth with whether or not to update my descriptions for my client's websites. I know that Google is now dynamically generating descriptions based off of content, but is it still beneficial to write longer descriptions as well? Will Google display my longer description now if it is ranking well? Rand Fishkin at Moz and others say that you should and other people, including Danny Sullivan, have said you shouldn't worry about it and leave them at between 150-160. My questions is what should I do? I will be focusing heavily on making sure the site's content is very targeted and relevant for when Google dynamically generates the descriptions, but should I still edit my descriptions manually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kenturley2 -
Brightcove SEO Best Practices?
My company has decided to go with Brightcove as a video platform so we can better monetize all of the video content we create and better customize the experience as well. We have a pretty decent YouTube presence, and I won't let them stop using that because it would totally alienate us from part of our audience. So I was hoping someone could help me with the following: Are we able to keep videos hosted on YouTube as well as Brightcove without any risk of duplicate content? If we use the Brightcove player to embed videos in our on-site content, are we hindering potential organic search visibility? On the embeds, it's looking like it's using an iframe in our content (https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/sativa-indica-and-hybrid-whats-the-difference-between-cannabis-ty) - We're using a Brightcove WP plugin for the embed, but I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on a better way to implement/if this is even an issue at all. Are there any other general best practices/insights anyone has working with this platform? I found this article on their site, but I was wondering if there was anything else I should consider. Thank you in advance for any insights/answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidkaralisjr0 -
What is the best way to link between all my portals?
Hi I own 12 different portals within gambling, they do more or less work and feel like this one, Casinotopplisten, what is the best way for me to link between all of them? Since there is alot going on in Google these days I havent linked between the sites at all, but i feel that to be a somewhat waste. So here is my three ideas so far, in ranked order: Add a menu at the topp right of the site, or footer, that links to the 10 different sites with different languages. The text link should then only be "Norwegian, Swedish, English etc.." Basiclly the same as about, but in addition linking to the "same page" in the other languages. As all pages have the same article set for startes this can be done. Dont do any linking between the sites and only link to the sites separately from our company blog/site.. Dont link at all. I should add that all of these sites are on different IPs with different domains and all in different languages. Hope someone can add their 2c on this one.. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MortenBratli0 -
Best practice?
Hi there, I have recently written an article which I have posted on an online newspaper website. I want to use this article and put it on my blog also, the reason the article will be placed on my blog is to drive users from my email marketing activities. Would it simply be best practice to disallow Google from crawling this page? or put a rel canonical on the article placed on my blog pointing to the article placed on the online newspaper website? Thanks for any suggestions
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
SEO Features of Different Shopping Cart, Need Help on Selecting BEST Cart
I want to move my existing online store to a new Multilanguage Shopping Cart. After reading Andrew Bleakley's review, I have to make a dissisions between the following shopping cart. New to SEO, I will like to have your impressions on there SEO Features and HELP me select the BEST SEO frendly shopping cart. corecommerce: Search Engine Friendly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze205
• Entire store is search engine optimized
• Dynamically generates static html pages with clean URL's (no numbers and special characters inside the URL's) for products, categories and custom content pages (ie about us, etc.)
• Auto Generated Meta Tags for your store to create web site page rankings that matter!
• Built in Canonical URL's
• Header tags usage for your product names
• Auto-build of the Google XML Sitemap
• Meta tags for all products, categories and content pages
• Add your own custom meta tags from your store
• You determine the page titles
• You can add custom content for the category pages
• Use of alt and title tags for images
• Use of bread crumb trails
• Customer SEO page slugs (naming) for products and categories americommerce: Have a look at there page, the list is to long. http://www.americommerce.com/ecommerce-seo.html ------------------------------ asho Web Optimisation - SEO
Fully Search Engine Optimised (SEO) structure
Optimised and updated by industry leading SEO experts
Source code optimised for search engines
Page based META management. Titles, descriptions and keywords
Link popularity program between Ashop Commerce customers
Always up to date with new search engine algorithms
Spider friendly URLs
301 Redirect and 302 Redirect support for any page
Free SEO tips & tools
Auto HTML and CSS page generation
Google, Yahoo and Bing verification meta inclusion
Inbuilt automatic XML site map generation (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
Correct use of robots.txt file
Correct use of NOFOLLOW attribute
Auto set up with correct hierarchy for H tags
Auto creation of alt text on menu text links and images
Tableless design structure Pinnaclecart Cutting-edge search engine optimization
Flat URL generation (www.yoursite.com/product/product-name.htm)
Ability to create your own URL structure (www.yoursite.com/create-your-own-url.html)
Manage all URL's at the category, product and page level.
If you're moving from a different application, you can change the URL's to match the old URL's.
Meta keyword, title and description for each product page
Meta keyword, title and description for each category page
Meta keyword and description for home page and all pages created via the control panel
Upload / create robot.txt file
Ability to generate meta tags based on product descriptions
Ability to modify HTML or CSS via browser
Automatically generated site map
Generates XML site map for Google Base
Valid WC3 template design
Image ALT tags
Design generates very lightweight, 100% HTML page without CSS or PHP coding
Creates "breadcrumb" navigation
Search-engine-friendly architecture
Ability to upload customized HTML pages to assist in How would you rate those carts structure in a SEO point of view? My existing store, http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ (OsCommerce) need SEO improvement and moving it to a SEO Frendly Shopping Cart is the best thing I can do to increase sales and conversions. Thank you for your support, help and precious time. BigBlaze0 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0