Multi-Locations Business Internet Presence
-
We are at a crossroad and it's time to decide which direction to travel. We had 4 physical locations represented by 3 websites, August 1st we now have 6 addresses and are going to redesign our websites. Heritage Printing .com is our primary and does very well in DC for printing & signage. Heritage Printing Charlotte .com does well in NC for signs.
How would you proceed?
- Build 2 more websites for a total of 5: Heritage Custom Signs & Heritage Custom Signs DC .coms
- Build a unified site under Heritage Printing .com (w/ subdomains or locations folders)
I fear losing our Internet Presence and Page Rank w/ Google by unifying but also fear fueling the ever growing fragmentation of our brand. FYI: We recently Trade Marked Heritage Printing & our logo
So fellow Mozzers, what do you recommend and how would you proceed?
TY in advance
KJr
-
Hi Kevin!
I apologize for not noticing your thread earlier. Don't know how I missed it!
You are describing so well what happens when a multi-site approach begins to get out of hand. While you could, of course, run 5 different websites, the long term health of the brand is likely going to be best served by consolidation, with proper redirects being set up from the old sites to the new umbrella site, and citations being corrected to reflect the change of URL. You'll likely want to dedicate good resources to earning some new links, while you're at it, to the main site, to strengthen your hand, and a dedicated review acquisition campaign would be smart to throw into this mix, too.
Could you lose rankings? Yes, it's possible, but you can mitigate this as much as possible with proper redirects.
The major benefit of consolidation will be that, going forward, every single action you take will go to strengthening the brand, rather than you having to slice that up 5 different ways. Your goal will be to become the dominant player in your city for everything you do with an incredibly powerful website backed up with a unified marketing plan.
I do recommend going with folders rather than subdomains. It's simpler.
Hoping you'll get some other opinions from our community, and that this one helps. Wishing you luck in the work ahead!
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
-
Best Way to Handle Multi-Language Sites
In the last year we've made a few significant changes to the structure of our site - namely adding translations for a few languages. We have historically been gaining in organic search by about 10% each month, but in the last two months we've leveled out and seen a slight dip. I am wondering if this has something to do with the addition of the second language, and namely if there's a chance we've been penalized due to duplicate content. We have almost all pages / content on the site translated by a translator, but the way the development works the site will grab the english version if a translation hasn't been added - potentially adding some duplicate content? The URL structure remains the same, other than the addiion of the language - site.com/our-tour vs site.com/de/our-tour We also haven't translated the tour name itself, so that remains the same. Just wondering if anyone has any feedback on best practices here or things I should be looking out for. Thanks in Advance.
On-Page Optimization | | mkgreyound1 -
One service - multiple locations
Just started working on a website with 2 services and a LOT of locations... So website is something like categorized in states and subcategories are cities... But it only offers 2 services. So each city out of 100 has one page per service... It seems to me like something not pretty good but I have no experience with such sites. I know that it is ok if you have stores on different locations so you can do local for all them but in this case website owner just wanted to rank high for 100 cities and actually he is doing pretty good... But I somehow think that may cause problems in future and google could consider it as a spam, no matter of unique content on 100 pages when it is actually the same... So if you have any advice for this situation, I am listening 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | m2webs0 -
Multiple business location - a nightmare scenario
Hi Guys, I was wondering how should i tackle the url structure for the following scenario: Company provides several hypnotherapy services including 'stop smoking', 'cbt', 'weight loss' and more ... and have offices in 3 cities. Currently, the website has the following structure. www.website.com/stop-smoking-city1
On-Page Optimization | | Syed_Ozair
www.website.com/stop-smoking-city2
www.website.com/stop-smoking-city3 and so on ... would it be better to have the following url structure ... www.website.com/city1/stop-smoking
www.website.com/city1/weight-loss
www.website.com/city1/cbt and so on ... Please advise!0 -
Can I add multi location business cities to homepage meta title or desc.?
I have a business with 6 locations (in the same state) but very different cities. We we expanded from one location with the city name in the URL we followed best practices to move to the new domain without the singular city name in the URL. We definitly took a hit on the organic side and I'm trying to figure out best practice for where to add geo info. Currently I have geo info: -In footer
On-Page Optimization | | beehiive
-Contact Page -On local page It's a WP site and each location has it's own page (ie. locations/geolocation_keyword). I know all other locations will take sometime but my concern is the hit we took on the original location that had geo-target URL. I guess really my question is simply can I include city names in homepage meta title and desc.?
and is there anything else I can do to bounce back organically on the original city faster?0 -
Hi can anyone help me with navigating through my business admin page? having a little trouble. Many Thanks
It looks like this... The person that created it has put the term "Hand painted ceramics from spain - inspired ceramica" on every page title and i cant find where it is to delete it. If anyone can help that will be a real help. Many Thanks, Robbie oOU4YDY
On-Page Optimization | | allenr120 -
One site, one location, multiple languages - best approach?
Hey folks, Has anyone created a multilingual site targeted at a single location? I have a site that I need to create which is targeting users in Spain. There are going to need to be English and Spanish versions of the text. My thoughts would be to handle it this way: 1. Geolocate the entire site to spain 2. Have the english content in a folder /en/ 3. Have the spanish content in a folder /es/ As far as I am aware the same content in another language is not considered duplicate content and Google should handle folks searching in spanish or english and show them the correct landing page. Sounds easy enough in principle but I also have these other options to seemingly solidify the approach: 4. Add: rel="alternate" hreflang="x" (3) 5. Add language information to a sitemap (4) Again, none of that seems terribly difficult but would welcome any feedback and particularly experience of multilingual sites targeting a single location. Thanks all Marcus References and info 1. Multi Regional:
On-Page Optimization | | Marcus_Miller
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html 2. Multi Language:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html 3. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 4. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=26208650 -
To use or not to use: Keywords with locations
Hello there. I work for a marketing agency that manages SEO campaigns for a variety of small businesses in South Florida. Let's say we have a client that sells cheap shoes at their store location. Obviously, we want to show up in Google rankings for search terms like "cheap shoes south florida" or "cheap shoes miami." Now, my question is, when optimizing a website's content for various keywords, is it really necessary to include keywords with the location (which are often awkward for both reading and writing purposes)? Ideally, I'd prefer to have text that always reads as naturally as possible. Text like this is just an eyesore: Welcome to ExampleSite.com, home of the best cheap shoes Florida. We offer all kinds of cheap shoes Boca Raton. Your whole family doesn't have enough fingers and toes to count how many cheap shoes West Palm Beach we have in stock! Contact us to ask about our cheap shoes Miami discounts today! Olé!" What say you? Is there a way to work around ugly SEO text like this while still effectively ranking for GEO terms? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BBEXNinja0 -
Locating Duplicate Pages
Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index. Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0