Handling Multiple Restaurants Under One Domain

[thinkcreativegroup]

We are working with a client that has 2 different restaurants. One has been established since 1938, the other was opened in late 2012. Currently, each site has its own domain name. From a marketing/branding perspective, we would like to make the customers [web visitors] of the established restaurant aware of the sister restaurant. To accomplish this, we are thinking about creating a landing page that links to each restaurant. To do this, we would need to purchase a brand new URL, and then place each restaurant in a separate sub folder of the new URL. The other thought is to have each site accessed from the main new URL [within sub folders] and also point each existing URL to the appropriate sub folder for each restaurant. We know there are some branding and marketing hurdles with this approach that we need to think through/work out. But, we are not sure how this would impact their SEO––and assume it will not be good. Any thoughts on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

[MiriamEllis]

Glad to hear it!

[thinkcreativegroup]

Helps a ton!

[thinkcreativegroup]

Thanks for your input!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi ThinkCreativeGroup,

If the restaurants have different names (i.e. Bob's Pancake House vs. Bill's Burgers) then you should keep them on separate domains and do all marketing completely separately without making any effort to link the two to one another.

If there is some shared history, you could put it in a non-indexable infographic along the lines of "The Jones family opened Bob's Pancake House in 1938. In 1950, they invented their famous buckwheat cake stack. In 2012, son Bill opened Bill's Burgers across town". If, for reasons of pride, the owner wants to highlight something like this, that's fine, but I wouldn't do it in indexable text.

If the restaurants are two branches of the same brand (i.e. both of them are Bob's Pancake House) then, yes, you could develop a single website with a landing page for each physical location. You would then be linking to each of these landing pages from the citation building campaign for each location.

Hope this helps!

[FedeEinhorn]

Restaurant names/brand names are different? If that's the case I'd suggest you stick with one Website for each one of them and if you'd like you can link them together with a nofollow link.

From an SEO perspective, you can get more authority if you use a single domain for both, but if I look it from the user point of view, 2 sites seems much more appropriate, and Google says every day: think, and build to users.

It is ultimately your choice, those are just my 2 cents