Multi-Location SEO: Sites vs Pages
-
I just started with a new company that requires multi-location SEO for its niche product/service. Currently, we have a main corporate website, as well as, 40+ individual dealer websites (we host all). Keep in mind each of these dealers consist of only 1-2 people, so corporate I will be managing the site or sites and content strategy. Many of the individual dealer sites actually rank very well (#1-#3) in their areas for our targeted keywords, but they all use the same duplicate content. Also, there are many dealer sites that have dropped off the radar in last year, which is probably because of the duplicate and static content. So I'm at a crossroads...
- Attempt to redo all of these location sites with unique and local content for each or
- Create optimized unique pages for each of them on our main site and redirect their current local domains to their page on our site
Any advise regarding which direction to go in and why. Why is very important. It will be very difficult to convince a dealer that is #1 with his local site that we are redirecting to our main site, so I need some good ammo and reasoning. Also, any tips toward achieving local seo success will be greatly appreciated, too!
Thank you!
-
I would still start with the sites that aren't ranking first. The more things you try to do at once, the less predictable the outcome is and the greater the risk of a negative impact.
Start by moving over a few sites that aren't ranking that well. Gauge the impact. Do their rankings increase or drop? What about a month after you've made the move? Once you have a better idea of what the impact will be, you can move over a few more sites, and repeat the process.
A piecemeal approach may take a little longer, but it reduces your risk and gives you a more predictable outcome. It also will allow you to perfect the process of moving sites before you get to the moneymakers that are already ranking well.
-
Thank you for sharing that webinar! Great stuff!
While they are getting decent traffic, I do not want to think short term. Like you said, we could be left with nothing. Many locations have seen the drop in rankings, so probably just a matter of time. So I'm going to switch over to the unique local pages on our site and redirect their pages to the main site. Much more manageable solution with less risk of duplicate content. (ahhh...)
If I redirect their old homepage to their new local page on our site and each product page on their site to that product page on our main site we should benefit from that link juice right both nationally and locally? Their is some value in acquiring those ranking URLs, right?
-
Is being #1 bringing in traffic and $? If so, Takeshi's answer below might be worth looking into. The only problem with "If it aint broke don't fix it.", is that once it's broke, you're left w/ nothing....or worse.
REI and Cabela's do a nice job.
This Mozinar from last year is really good-
-
"If it ain't broke, why fix it?" Haha! True. Pretty sure that is the exact response from one of my dealers.
Another variable I failed to mention is that the dealer sites are running on a very old CMS version, and their current template is not compatible with updated version. Outdated CMS has resulted in a few security issues. Meaning, I am forced to make a decision.
-
They are not very unique. Same product and service just in a different regions.
- How would you respond to a local dealer that has a site ranking #1 for targeted keywords?
- Any outstanding corporate websites with good location structure you would recommend?
-
Redirecting sites that are already ranking is almost guaranteed to result in a rankings drop, at least in the short term. However, managing 40 sites is a ton of effort, especially if they're all using duplicate content, and they don't benefit from the domain authority of your main corporate site.
Why don't you start with moving over the dealer sites that aren't ranking onto your main site. That way they will benefit from the domain authority of your main domain, and you can clean them up a little with some unique content to improve their rankings. The sites that are already ranking, you can leave alone until they run into any roadblocks. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
-
It's tough to give an answer w/o knowing specifics.
If each dealer is truly unique and not just a "branch", then go for unique sites w/ unique content.
Otherwise, follow the standard corporate website structure and create a page to each location.
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
-
Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical
A client of mine has a lot of differentiated landing pages with only a few changes on each, but with the same intent and goal as the generic version. The generic version of the landing page is included in navigation, sitemap and is indexed on Google. The purpose of the differentiated landing pages is to include the city and some minor changes in the text/imagery to best fit the Adwords text. Other than that, the intent and purpose of the pages are the same as the main / generic page. They are not to be indexed, nor am I trying to have hidden pages linking to the generic and indexed one (I'm not going the blackhat way). So – I want to avoid that the duplicate landing pages are being indexed (obviously), but I'm not sure if I should use noindex (nofollow as well?) or rel=canonical, since these landing pages are localized campaign versions of the generic page with more or less only paid traffic to them. I don't want to be accidentally penalized, but I still need the generic / main page to rank as high as possible... What would be your recommendation on this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ostesmorbrod0 -
Adding hreflang tags - better on each page, or the site map?
Hello, I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article). My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit. One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags. My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else? Any other thoughts are appreciated. Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly. Thanks!Lauryn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john_marketade0 -
SEO strategy for conversion-optimised home page
I'm working on a very conventional-type site with a home page (why come to us), methods we use, pricing, reviews, FAQs and contact us. After reading the Moz case study at (http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/), I have been working on a conversion-optimised home page that consolidates much of content in all these pages. At the bottom of the home page, I then plan to add a list of blog posts "Want to read more? We have a lot of useful information on our blog. Here are the most popular articles:" with articles that explain more about the methods we use for example (content that was formerly on our methods page). Obviously this new blog will also have more interesting information (but a lot that could actually be converted into pages) This radically changes the site into just a home page full of selling points and calls-to-action and a blog. I have some questions about this strategy: How do we keep our search engine ranking for keywords such as "[our service] prices" or "[a particular method] London". We rank quite well on Google for these and it goes straight to the relevant page. Shall we keep the pages active somewhere even though the information is also on the home page? Is a blog actually necessary here (SEO wise)? The things I'm planning to write could easily be made into more pages. Am I going about this completely wrong by trying using the CRO guide? Should this sort of page be reserved for landing pages? The reason why I'm considering making a conversion-generating home page is because we only sell one service pretty much (although there are differences in how we do it on children vs. adults) and because we are quite niche so most of our traffic comes from organic sources. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LondonAli0 -
301 or 404 Question for thin content Location Pages we want to remove
Hello All, I have a Hire Website with many categories and individual location pages for each of the 70 depots we operate. However, being dynamic pages, we have thousands of thin content pages. We have decided to only concentrate on our best performing locations and get rid of the rest as its physically impossible to write unique content for all our location pages for every categories. Therefore my question is. Would it cause me problems by having to many 301's for the location pages I am going to re-direct ( i was only going to send these back to the parent category page) or should I just 404 all those location pages and at some point in the future when we are in a position to concentrate on these locations then redo them with new content ? in terms of url numbers It would affect a few thousand 301's or 404's depending on people thoughts. Also , does anyone know what percentage of thin content on a site should be acceptable ?.. I know , none is best in an ideal world but it would be easier if there we could get away with a little percentage. We have been affected by Panda , so we are trying to tidy things up as best at possible, Any advice greatly appreciated? thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Investigating Google's treatment of different pages on our site - canonicals, addresses, and more.
Hey all - I hesitate to ask this question, but have spent weeks trying to figure it out to no avail. We are a real estate company and many of our building pages do not show up for a given address. I first thought maybe google did not like us, but we show up well for certain keywords 3rd for Houston office space and dallas office space, etc. We have decent DA and inbound links, but for some reason we do not show up for addresses. An example, 44 Wall St or 44 Wall St office space, we are no where to be found. Our title and description should allow us to easily picked up, but after scrolling through 15 pages (with a ton of non relevant results), we do not show up. This happens quite a bit. I have checked we are being crawled by looking at 44 Wall St TheSquareFoot and checking the cause. We have individual listing pages (with the same titles and descriptions) inside the buildings, but use canonical tags to let google know that these are related and want the building pages to be dominant. I have worked though quite a few tests and can not come up with a reason. If we were just page 7 and never moved it would be one thing, but since we do not show up at all, it almost seems like google is punishing us. My hope is there is one thing that we are doing wrong that is easily fixed. I realize in an ideal world we would have shorter URLs and other nits and nats, but this feels like something that would help us go from page 3 to page 1, not prevent us from ranking at all. Any thoughts or helpful comments would be greatly appreciated. http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10005/lower-manhattan/44-wall-st/44-wall-street We do show up one page 1 for this building - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10036/midtown/1501-broadway, but is the exception. I have tried investigating any differences, but am quite baffled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AtticusBerg10 -
Page Speed Factors For SEO
Hey Guys, I have developed a page and optimised it. I have got a dilemma, I have 2 variants of the optimised page I could use. The page is responsive and uses bootstrap from an external CDN. The 2 variants: External CDN - This is adding an an extra request and is delivering the entire framework (not ideal for mobile) I've looked in the node/grunt.js route (+unCSS) to remove redundant CSS, which led me to my next variant. Inline CSS. After doing some grunt.js work I shaved out the redundant code from the framework then added it inline. I will also point out that all assets are optimised, all CSS/JS/HTML is minifed. In terms for score the 1st variant is less than the second, but I believe that most users of the internet already have bootstrap cached due to it being so common. The ultimate question comes down to ranking, I'm not entirely sure where I draw the line between development and SEO (I will also ask in Stack Overflow). Which one would rank better? all other factors being equal.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AkashMakwana0 -
SEO structure question: Better to add similar (but distinct) content to multiple unique pages or make one unique page?
Not sure which approach would be more SEO ranking friendly? As we are a music store, we do instrument repairs on all instruments. Currently, I don't have much of any content about our repairs on our website... so I'm considering a couple different approaches of adding this content: Let's take Trumpet Repair for example: 1. I can auto write to the HTML body (say, at the end of the body) of our 20 Trumpets (each having their own page) we have for sale on our site, the verbiage of all repairs, services, rates, and other repair related detail. In my mind, the effect of this may be that: This added information does uniquely pertain to Trumpets only (excludes all other instrument repair info), which Google likes... but it would be duplicate Trumpet repair information over 20 pages.... which Google may not like? 2. Or I could auto write the repair details to the Trumpet's Category Page - either in the Body, Header, or Footer. This definitely reduces the redundancy of the repeating Trumpet repair info per Trumpet page, but it also reduces each Trumpet pages content depth... so I'm not sure which out weighs the other? 3. Write it to both category page & individual pages? Possibly valuable because the information is anchoring all around itself and supporting... or is that super duplication? 4. Of course, create a category dedicated to repairs then add a subcategory for each instrument and have the repair info there be completely unique to that page...- then in the body of each 20 Trumpets, tag an internal link to Trumpet Repair? Any suggestions greatly appreciated? Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
Mobile SEO vs. normal SEO?
Hi everyone, I wanted to ask you abour your opinon on mobile SEO. Do we already have two different Indices, one for mobile, one for desktop? Except a few mobile listings I don't see a difference yet. If yes, do I need to do special mobile SEO for my site or is it enough to have e.g. a responsive webdesign which detects the device and shows a different page? Are there any other extra Mobile SEO measures that should be considered? I know of the Mobile Sitemap and directories but is there anything else? Best regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrazySEO0