Microsites for Local Search / Location Based sites?
-
Referring to the webinar on SEOMoz about Local Search that was presented by Nifty Marketing (http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/be-where-local-is-going). I have a question my client asked us regarding why we broke out their locations into microsites, and not just used subfolders. So here are the details:
- The client has one main website in real estate.
- They have 5 branches.
- Each branch covers about a 50 mile radius.
- Each branch also covers a specialized niche in their areas.
- When we created the main site we incorporated the full list of listings on the main site;
- We then created a microsite for each branch, who has a page of listings (same as the main site) but included the canonical link back to the main site.
- The reason we created a microsite for each branch is that the searches for each branch are very specific to their location and we felt that having only a subfolder would take away from the relevancy of the site and it's location.
- Now, the location sites rank on the first page for their very competitive, location based searches.
- The client, as we encourage, has had recommendations from others saying this is hurting them, not helping them.
My question is this... How can this hurt them when the microsites include a home page specific to the location, a contact page that is optimized with location specific information (maps, text, directions, NAP, call to action, etc.), a page listing area information about communities/events/etc., a page of the location's agents, and of course real estate listings (with canonical back to the main site)?
Am I misunderstanding? I understood that if the main site could support the separation of a section into a microsite, this would help local search. Local search is the bread and butter of this client's conversions.
AND if you tell me we should go back to having subfolders for each location, won't that seriously hurt our already excellent rankings? The client sees significant visitors from their placement of the location URLs.
THANKS!
Darlene -
Hi Darlene,
I found your question rather interesting as I have also been looking into the entire Local SEO thing recently.
I opted to go for localised pages on the main site though:
http://www.jhbathrooms.com/showroom/stockton-on-tees
Couldn’t you rather use your microsites for back-linking purposes in an attempt to boost your main site’s DA (and pages PR)? You could probably get away with more aggressive linking techniques towards these microsites without putting your main site at risk? Or am I wrong in assuming this? I would love to see other people’s opinion on this…
I am rather an SEO newbie, only being back into SEO for about 6 months after a very long absence. Used to do SEO back in 2000-2001; remember Alta Vista and Webposition Gold anyone?Cheers
Greg
-
Darlene,
I think there are a couple of issues here that may be causing confusion. First and foremost, are the sites "microsites?" It does not sound like they are in the most exact sense. Because you are not giving an example, it is more problematic. Secondarily, it is easy in SEO to get caught up in should you or should you not do a specific thing and what are the effects of that, as if all is in a vacuum. Obviously, it is not and there is more at play than just the variables you describe.
Otherwise, if it were simple the question would be: We can build an RE Site with listings, title tags, etc. based on location such that BigCity/neighborhood/address (All - I am being simplistic for brevity only). Or we can build big city with listings in that city then build micro sites based on the neighborhoods.
If that were the case, I am going with big city and sub directories as opposed to multiple sites due to competing against myself. Also, if you are really the same company, and you are using the sites to appear as 5 different companies and be in the rankings 5 or 6 times (to "lock" others out) that would be against Google guidelines.From what you have, I would say you have this:
MainTownRESiteExample.com (This site receives all MLS listings)- I am assuming using IDX or RETS feeds for the MLS to sites. You covered your duplicate content bases for the listings by using a canonical tag for each back to the main site (and this was likely not necessary IMO if using IDX or RETS feeds)
AreaofGeoSiteA - you said each covers a niche which to me means say TownHome sales or Leasing, etc. Do you mean niche to mean geographic niche?
AreaofGeoSiteB
AreaofGeoSiteC, etc. (I am assuming there is over lap of each of the 50mile radius points. If not, and main site is city center, you are in a city larger than Houston in area.
You state: "We then created a microsite for each branch..." I am assuming therefore, that each of the "microsites" has its own physical location with its own NAP.
Most importantly, you state
The reason we created a microsite for each branch is that the searches for each branch are very specific to their location and we felt that having only a subfolder would take away from the relevancy of the site and it's location.
To this, I would say, uhhh, nope, it does not decrease the relevance of the main site in the least. Nor, would a search on neighborhood X be more or less relevant due to the whole site being neighborhood X versus being MainSite.com/neighborhood-X. Either way, what ranks in the serps is a page, not a site and that is relevant to what you say about the site. If main site has a ton of DA, and small site has OK DA, where does the page better reside?
You also state:
**I understood that if the main site could support the separation of a section into a microsite, this would help local search. **From where did you understand that? I have not heard of separating sites into locations to support local. I am not saying you are wrong, just had not heard of it.
So the big questions are: will your arrangement hurt your client and if so, how? It can end up just competing with the main site and even if it wins, why do you have the data in two places to start with? But, if you are seeing no harm and the client is ranked well for a given area, you have to walk them through how a change would take place and what might happen, etc. Then, they get to make the decision, not you. (At least in my shop that's how we do it).
For me, for real estate, I would rather use small sites for an individual listing and the big site for the mls feeds. So, while I would not do it the way you have done it, it does not mean you are not getting a result you want. I personally believe you could have done it with sub directories, but you are where you are. Again, personal preference for me is in RE to have a site for Townhomes, Single family, Condos, etc., but again, the SEO in me says you can accomplish the same with other means.
Yes, if you change back to main site, you will lose your rankings when you remove your pages but you can 301 to capture some of that juice, etc. It won't guarantee that ranking though.
When people say you are taking "power" away, I believe they mean you are competing with yourself and your efforts on one site would be better served. Not that the micro site in some way leeches from the main.
Dave is on the right track from a business perspective and I would caution rushing out and taking the sites down. But, again, having done a LOT in dating starting back in the late 90's, I can tell you the microsite in its original iteration was meant to look like a different business and be able to rank organically and in PPC five different ways. That is against the rules and will get you penalized no matter how unique the content might be.
So, I hope I helped you out a bit and let us know what you did. If the decision is to take them down, get the clients to agree to start with one and track what happens, etc. Then learn and go to number two.
Best to you and to Dave,
Robert
PS - I am a vegetarian really.
-
Power? That sounds like some SEO guru baloney. If the sites are ranking and full of high quality non-spun unique relevant content - what's the problem?
-
Thanks Dave,
They aren't really complaining. It's more of the advice that's being offered to them by other parties. Other's are saying that I'm taking "power" away from the main site by using these smaller sites.
But...these smaller sites are pretty substantial in their own right. I believe that keeping them as microsites is the better way for local search.
Like Dave said, ANY info from anyone else is greatly appreciated.
-
I've done a TON of research on this to get Google's opinion and the only thing I could find was this:
As long as the new site has unique and relevant content it is not considered spam.
I've probably spent over 20 hours researching this EXACT topic and that was the best I could find in terms of spam vs not spam.
Another route to take is to create relevant content on the main site specific to each location. Perhaps you can create 1 page for the location with the NAP, site manager etc. and then another page off of that page that lists that specific location's directions and then another page off of that page that lists the reviews for that location. That gives you 3 unique relevant pages and 3 new Title tags. You can target the main city on the main page with the NAP info, a sub-city on one of the review pages and another sub-city on the direction page. I suppose this method is more "whitehat" but who really knows.
If the client has good rankings in all of those cities with your microsites what are they complaining about? Fear of a penalty?
If anyone else has ANY info on this I would LOVE to know as well!
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
-
Google Search Console Not Indexing Pages
Hi there! I have a problem that I was hoping someone could help me with. On google search console, my website does not seem to be indexed well. In fact, even after rectifying problems that Moz's on-demand crawl has pointed out, it still does not become "valid". There are some of the excluded pages that Google has pointed out. I have rectified some of the issues but it doesn't seem to be helping. However, when I submitted the sitemap, it says that the URLs were discoverable, hence I am not sure why they can be discovered but are not deemed "valid". I would sincerely appreciate any suggestions or insights as to how can I go about to solve this issue. Thanks! Screenshot+%28341%29.png Screenshot+%28342%29.png Screenshot+%28343%29.png
Algorithm Updates | | Chowsey0 -
Search results performance affected by similarly named Adult business?!
Hey This is an unusual one I guess and one we've scratched our heads on for ages without reaching any definitive answer, so would be very grateful to the Moz community for some thought and guidance! Client website: https://www.themassagerooms.com This is a professionally run, therapeutic health business offering on-demand ("mobile", ie visiting customers at their homes) massage service. Importantly, please note again (you'll see why in a minute) the exact URL and the fact that this business, our client, is a registered therapeutic health and wellness business (ie it is genuine, real, massage services). The business has been around for about 10 years and used to rank very highly for many dream keywords for their industry. However, several years ago they got approached by a domain reseller offer to sell them "massagerooms.com" (ie the same name but without the "The" at the beginning) for a few thousand pounds. They rejected the offer. Interesting Aside: This happened a short while before the Facebook movie was launched ... if they'd seen that movie perhaps they would have accepted! (Facebook was originally called The Facebook but then one of the key investors advised them to drop the "The"! Anyway, unfortunately for them, that offered domain name (massagerooms.com) was then sold to an online adult video services company. Soon after, themassagerooms.com rankings started to suffer. Today, TheMassageRooms.com have a technically very clean site (great scores on Google LightSpeed etc), with regularly updated relevant health and wellness content. They are doing ok in terms of rankings but no where near as well as many of their competitors who on the face of it seem to have significantly worse on and off-page scores as well as many spammy links. Also, TheMassageRooms.com have a much better Moz DA then those competitors that are ranking better. The big question is whether the existence of an adult services website, MassageRooms.com with such a similar name is causing them issues in search results? Especially since many people (regular customers and even their own staff), do search for TheMassageRooms (ie the therapeutic health and wellness company) by only typing "massage rooms". So, there is a clear argument for saying "The Massage Rooms" = "Massage Rooms" in many respects, even through the two URLs which match these exact terms lead to very different businesses. Of course, one solution, might be to change the URL and 301 redirect everything. But would that actually make a difference if the actual issue is that Google's algorithm is somehow connected "MassageRooms.com" (adult site) with "TheMassageRooms.com" (our client's health and wellness site). Also it seems a bit drastic to ask them to change a 10 year established brand name etc.
Algorithm Updates | | AmerTMR0 -
Anyone suspect that a site's total page count affects SEO?
I've been trying to find out the underlying reason why so many websites are ranked higher than mine despite seemingly having far worse links. I've spent a lot of time researching and have read through all the general advice about what could possibly be hurting my site's SEO, from page speed to h1 tags to broken links, and all the various on-page SEO optimization stuff....so the issue here isn't very obvious. From viewing all of my competitors, they seem to have a much higher number of web pages on their sites than mine does. My site currently has 20 pages or so and most of my competitors are well in the hundreds, so I'm wondering if this could potentially be part of the issue here. I know Google has never officially said that page number matters, but does anyone suspect that perhaps page count matters towards SEO and that competing sites with more total pages than you might have an advantage SEOwise?
Algorithm Updates | | ButtaC1 -
My Website No Longer Appears in Mobile Google Search but Does in Desktop...Why Is This?
For a long time my website has appeared in both desktop and mobile search in Google. Yet recently it has stopped appearing in mobile yet still on desktop. Any ideas why this is happening and how to rectify it please? Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | WSIDW0 -
Post penguin & panda update. what would be a good seo strategies for brand new sites
Hi there. I have the luxury of launching a few sites after the penguin and panda updates, so I can start from scratch and hopefully do it right. I will get SEO companies to help me with this so i just want to ask for advices on what would be a good strategies for a brand new site. my understand of the new updates is this content and user experience is important, like how long they spend, how many pages etc social media is important. we intent to engage FB and twitter alot. in New Zealand, not too many people use google+ so we will probbaly just concentrate on the first two hopefully we will try to get people to share our website via social media, apparent that is important should only concentrate on high quality backlinks with a good diverse set of alt tags, but concentrate on branding rather than keywords. Am i correct to say that so far? if that is the principle, what would be the strategy to implement these goals? Links to any articles would also be great please. Love learning. i just want to do this right and hopefully try to future proof the sites against updates as possible. i guess quality content and links will most likely to be safe. Thank you for your help.
Algorithm Updates | | btrinh0 -
Boosting Organic Search
Hi there, I have been analysing the performance of my keywords through SEOMoz reports for some time now and I am trying to understand why I rank highly in certain keywords but do not receive any organic search visits for them? My pages are tagged with the keyword(s) and my content including new content through my blog pushes the words. These keywords are industry standards that I know people search for and are used by other companies and competitors and yet, my site does not receive many, if any, visits despite being ranked in the top 5 or 10. Any help or advice would be much appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | sparkit0 -
Why have organic hits to my site suddenly started to fluctuate widely?
Hits to my website have been gradually growing over the last 2 years to a point where there was 1300 organics a day. Recently the hits crashed to 300 a day and stayed there for a couple of days. They then bounced back to 1300 a day for a few more days before crashing down to 300 again. This has happened a few times now. Oscillating between two points. Its like the site is crossing a threshold of something, back and forth. I have looked at different parts of my site and every part is down by approximately the same percentage. Anyone out there have any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | easymatt0 -
Do Google donations to Wikimedia show any bias in search results?
Over the weekend we learned Google co-founder Sergey Brin donated $500,000 to Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia.com. Last year I believe Google donated $2 million to Wikimedia. I now ask, is this suspicious in anyway, seeing that Wikipedia ranks so well in Google for so many terms? There are several blog posts about it online here and there throughout the years, but what does everyone think?
Algorithm Updates | | DanDeceuster0