Subdomain question for law firm in Indiana, Michigan, and New Mexico.
-
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!
-
Crazy, I have quite a bit of experience with this exact scenario: law firms using geo subdomains to target specific areas.
Here's my findings and suggestions based on actual results and experience:- SEO on domain.com benefits atlanta.domain.com. This is a fact. If Starbucks decided to create subdomains tomorrow for every location, their subdomains would benefit from 91 DA. That's how Findlaw, lawyers.com and all those guys get first page placement with high DA and low PA.
- Digital Diameter is right, subdomains are more effective and directories are more efficient. UNLESS you have a really good multi-site CMS. Then you can be equally efficient and more effective.
I hope this answers your question, if you want some help or have any other questions, PM me.
-
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?
-
Subdomains (more effective):
In short the benefit is that Google will see each subdomain as a locally focused, independent site.
However, this is also the disadvantage of subdomains.
While they are more likely to be seen as locally focused, each subdomain will have to be managed, provided with unique content and links so it can quickly become much more effort.
Folders (more efficient):
Folders offer much more synergy as they are seen as a single site, but they are also seen as less local / independently targets than subdomains.
-
Randal,
I think in this instance first and foremost lets talk about url structure.From an organic search perspective structuring urls in this way (http://michigan.2keller.com) will hinder any positive seo you do on your main url. Google would view your current url structure as individual domains, therefore none of the seo strategy done on 2keller.com will transfer to the other domains.How the url is structured should not have any affect on how your add the content. We deal with national clients with multiple locations all the time. How you want to structure this is http://www.2keller.com/Michigan or http://www.2keller.com/newmexico. This would allow your team to only have to do search marketing work once and would add efficiency's to your work flow.
I know your main concern is the amount of state specific content. You can still create the pages the exact same way as before from a content perspective. Just have a solid internal linking structure on 2keller.com guiding people to the proper relevant pages or you could use geo targeting allowing the site to recognize IP address and auto-direct people to the right area. Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any questions.
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
-
New website on new url?
We have a new website on a new url (been up for around 2 years now) and our old website is slowly fading in the background, we are now at the point where the money is still ok but we are having issues running both side by side, we have a calculator on each page and are thinking about removing this and adding a box with please order from our new site here (with url of similar page). Now the issue is we don't want to link for SEO purposes and google hammer us (thinking of no - following these) and we also have a penalty we got in 2012 on the site but we did get out of this, would this cause any issue to the new site?
Technical SEO | | BobAnderson1 -
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
Blocking subdomains without blocking sites...
So let's say I am working for bloggingplatform.com, and people can create free sites through my tools and those sites show up as myblog.bloggingplatform.com. However that site can also be accessed from myblog.com. Is there a way, separate from editing the myblog.com site code or files, for me to tell google to stop indexing myblog.bloggingplatform.com while still letting them index myblog.com without inserting any code into the page load? This is a simplification of a problem I am running across. Basically, Google is associating subdomains to my domain that it shouldn't even index, and it is adversely affecting my main domain. Other than contacting the offending sub-domain holders (which we do), I am looking for a way to stop Google from indexing those domains at all (they are used for technical purposes, and not for users to find the sites). Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | SL_SEM1 -
301 redirect + new website copy
Hi There, We are currently redeveloping our website and we're rewriting and optimising our many of our service pages. I think I may already know the answer but should we apply 301 redirects from our old services pages to the new versions? The content subject matter will be the same on the new versions, they will just be completely reworded. I would be interested to hear your views. Thanks, Stu
Technical SEO | | Stuart260 -
Duplicate video content question
This is really two questions in one. 1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content? 2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content? Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick1 -
Where do you go to get a question answered by seomoz?
I thought it was here before but now the seomoz folks don't seem to be responding in this forum. Is there another place to go to get seomoz to answer a question?
Technical SEO | | klkirby0 -
Windows IIS 7 Redirect Question
I want to redirect the following 4 pages to the home page: http://www.phbalancedpool.com/pool-repair/pool_repair_arizona.html http://www.phbalancedpool.com/About%20Pool%20Cleaning%20Arizona/About_Page_Pool_Cleaning_Arizona.html http://www.phbalancedpool.com/specials/Pool%20Cleaning%20and%20Pool%20Repair%20Specials.html http://www.phbalancedpool.com/service-areas-in-arizona/Chandler_Gilbert_Mesa_Queen%20Creek_San%20Tan%20Valley.html This is what I am currently using for my Web.config file: <configuration></configuration> <match url=".*"></match> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^phbalancedpool.com$"></add> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.phbalancedpool.com/{R:0}" <="" span="">redirectType="Permanent" /></action> <location path="pool-repair/pool_repair_arizona.html"></location> <location path="About%20Pool%20Cleaning%20Arizona/About_Page_Pool_Cleaning_Arizona.html"></location> <location path="specials/Pool%20Cleaning%20and%20Pool%20Repair%20Specials.html"></location> <location path="service-areas-in-arizona/Chandler_Gilbert_Mesa_Queen%20Creek_San%20Tan%20Valley.html"></location> Only the first one is actually redirecting and I can't figure out why. What do I need to do to fix this?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0 -
New Sub-domains or New Directories for 10+ Year Domain?
We've got a one-page, 10+ year old domain that has a 65/100 domain authority that gets about 10k page views a day (I'm happy to share the URL but didn't know if that's permitted). The content changes daily (it's a daily bible verse) so most of this question is focused on domain authority, not the content. We're getting ready to provide translations of that daily content in 4 languages. Would it be better to create sub-domains for those translations (same content, different language) or sub-folders? Example: http://cn.example.com
Technical SEO | | ipllc
http://es.example.com
http://ru.example.com or http://example.com/cn
http://example.com/es
http://example.com/ru We're able to do either but want to pick the one that would give the translated version the most authority both now and moving forward. (We definitely don't want to penalize the root domain.) Thanks in advance for your input.0