A Branded Local Search Strategy utilizing Microsites?
-
Howdy Moz,
Over and over we hear of folks using microsites in addition to their main brand for targeting keyword specific niches. The main point of concern most folks have is either in duplicate content or being penalized by Google, which is also our concern. However, in one of our niches we notice a lot of competitors have set up secondary websites to rank in addition to the main website (basically take up more room on the SERPS). They are currently utilizing different domains, on different IPs, on different servers, etc. We verified because we called and they all rang to the same competitors.
So our thought was why not take the fight to them (so to speak) but with a branding and content strategy. The company has many good content pieces that we can utilize, like company mottos, missions statements, special projects, community outreach that can be turned into microsites with unique content.
Our strategy idea is the take a company called "ACME Plumbing" and brand for specific keywords with locations like sacramentoplumberwarranty.com where the site's content revolves around plumber warranty info, measures of a good warranty, plumbing warranty news (newsworthy issues), blogs, RCS - you get the idea...and send both referral traffic and link to the main site.
The ideal is to then repeat the process with another company aspect like napaplumbingprojects.com where the content of the site is focused on cool projects, images, RCS, etc. Again, referring traffic and link juice to the main site.
We realize that this adds the amount of RCS that needs to be done, but that's exactly why we're here. Also, any thoughts of intentionally tying in the brand to the location so you get urls like acmeplumbingsacarmento.com?
-
Another very helpful answer - thank you. Moving forward, I still think the best approach is one website at the end of the day. After all, the saying is that it is better to mine one mine deep than to mine several at the same time.
In this particular niche, service industries like plumbing have exact match domains with less notable content. We're still working on the ability to offset this advantage they appear to have.
Thanks again!
-
Hi Imedia,
So glad to help. A multi-location business model's most unique power is that it can have multiple, legitimate local listings in Google (unlike a service area business with only one location but many service cities). The multi-location business can have one listing per public-facing physical office and these listings can be tied to landing pages on the website. For instance, the Chicago office listing can link to acmeplumbing.com/chicago-plumbing-company (just an example).
As for subdomains, Google reps have stated that Google has no preference for these over subfolders. In other words:
acmeplumbing.com/chicago-plumbing-company
is not a better or worse alternative to:
So long as Google can crawl the architecture of the website, they don't care. I find subfolders to be easier to manage than subdomains, personally, so I tend to go that way with my own clients. And, I would consider either subfolders or subdomains to be preferable to microsites, even for a multi-location business.
Exceptions to this? Possibly for large franchises with multiple franchise owners, it could be good for each branch to have its own, fully-fleshed-out website. For example, Ace Hardware is a large hardware franchise where I live. If each Ace location in California wanted to have its own website, in addition to the Ace Corporate website, this might be doable, but I wouldn't think of these as microsites. They'd need to be full-fledged websites. And, I would only suggest such a thing under the rare circumstance that the parent company had very clear guidelines about content policy, management of Google+ Local pages and citations and a whole host of other things. It could be a big huge mess, but in some circumstances, with tech savvy franchise owners, it might work.
Hope this helps!
-
I think these are great guidelines and recommendations. Quick question though - what if a small business has multiple locations and a different phone number at each location? Would it serve any purpose to have a microsite for these locations which are also branded accordingly?
Another strategy I see commonly used are subdomains under the main umbrella site. Any thoughts on that one? The client really wants to take up more space on the search results. So I want to make sure that we do a legit and unique approach to this. It may be that we instead create niche landing pages on the main site like:
acmeplumbing.com/sacramentoplumbingwarranty
Where this page is a specific section dedicated to plumbing warranties, faqs, warranty changes, newsworthy stories, etc. That way we continue the size of the site and keep our efforts focused in 1 place. One our main challenges is that competitors are finding ranking opportunities using keyword specific urls and different google voice phone numbers attached to the same business and location.
-
Great points all Miriam!
Many local businesses and SEOs have a Google strategy of divide and conquer.
With Google Local a better strategy is "United We Stand!"
The other important thing is that we need to be mindful of the S in NAPS (Name, address, phone, site) All need to tie together.
One well optimized site with location pages works better for a wide variety of reasons.
Here is a biggie that many don't realize. Let's say main site is optimized for all the plumbing KWs and Place page is linked to home page of main site.
Then you do a microsite for citywaterheaterrepairs.com. If NAP is on the site and other signals to help it rank locally, that tie it back to the main business, sometimes the algo will REPLACE THE URL on the main Place page with the microsite URL. What happens next? The ranking drops for the money KWs- city plumbers, city plumbing service etc, because the Place page is now linked to a site optimized for waterheaters.
I've had SEOs post in my forum about this problem and even post emails they have gotten from Google support saying they will not fix the URL. Support basically tells them the algo will connect whatever site it thinks is relevant and if you only want the algo to connect to your main site - then you should only have one main site.
So anyway that's just one potential issue that can come up. Hope that helps and best of luck!
-
Hi Imedia,
You've asked a smart question, and I'm hoping you get a variety of responses from the community. I'm going to weigh in here on why I am not a fan of microsites, specifically for local businesses. I'll break this into numbered points for easiest reading:
-
It's a core goal of every local business to be sure it is sending an absolutely clear NAP+W signal to Google. That's name, address, phone number + website. If Google connects the dots in any way between your microsites, you are posing the question to them, "What is the 'W' in 'NAP=W' here?" You don't want Google to have to ask this. You want them utterly convinced that acmeplumbing.com is your authoritative website. Not sacramentoacmeplumbing.com or sanjoseacmeplumbing.com or what have you.
-
The scenario you describe in which your competitors phone number/s are all ringing back to the same office is really concerning. If they are using the same phone number on multiple sites, this could seriously compound the issue described in point #1. Now Google is asking, "Does this phone number belong to Acme Plumbing or Sacramento Acme Plumbing?" The results of Google's confusing about this could lead to duplicate listings being created with erroneous details on them and ranking failures. Never cloud NAP if you can help it.
-
If the competitors are making the further mistake of putting any part of their physical address on the microsites, then they are really playing with fire. Google finding the same business name, phone number or address on more than one company website can be a recipe for disaster. Mis-matched NAP takes up three spots in the most negative ranking factors identified in the recent Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 survey (see: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors).
-
For a Service Area Business (SAB) model like a plumber, Google does understand that you have a single physical location and multiple service cities where you are not physically located, but restricts you to having a single listing reflective of physical locale. It makes sense to build out content for your service cities, but there is no reason this can't be on your authoritative website. Google is still a bit weak in carrying out EMD penalties in the Local sphere vs. the organic sphere, but the writing is on the wall that they are not a fan of the EMD strategy. It's still working for many businesses in Local, but who knows when that could end? Maybe tomorrow, right? I think it's simply safer to build out the content of your authoritative domain than to attempt to 'appear larger' with a host of geographically optimized EMDs.
-
For the local business owner, microsites can become a major headache. I've spoken with many business owners over the years who had these built by a previous firm, either because they thought it was a good idea or the marketer they'd hired thought it was a good idea. Then the relationship ended and the client may be confused about management of the sites or unable to access them, etc. Point being, why create a complex set of websites when a single one will do the job and everything you do on that authoritative site will enhance the company's true brand and visibility?
I hope my thoughts on this are helpful to you in your decision making process on this. You've asked an extremely good question!
-
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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Will including a global-site link in all 100 local-sites footer be considered spammy?
If I am a car manufacturer brand site(global), and I request all my location-specific domains include a link to the global site in their footers, would this trigger a red flag for Google? There are roughly 100 location-specific sites, but I would like to come up with a long term solution, so this number could be larger in the future. Is it best practice to only follow the footer link on each location-specific site Homepage, and nofollow the rest of the footer links on each site? Is it best to only include one followed link to the manufacturer brand site (global) on each location-specific domain? Is it best to not put this global link in the footer, but rather towards the top of the page only on the homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Linking C blocks strategy - Which hat is this tactic?
This related to a previous question I had about satellite sites. I questioned the white-hativity of their strategy. Basically to increase the number of linking C blocks they created 100+ websites on different C blocks that link back to our main domain. The issue I see is that- the sites are 98% exactly the same in appearance and content. Only small paragraph is different on the homepage. the sites only have outbound links to our main domain, no in-bound links Is this a legit? I am not an SEO expert, but have receive awesome advice here. So thank you in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Buddys0 -
Search Results Showing Additional info/Links
Did I miss something? I was looking at search result listings this morning and noticed that Walmart has additional information at the bottom of their (non-paid (I think)) search results. Please see the attached image and you'll notice links to "Item Description - Product Warranty and Service - Specifications - Gifting Plans" How are they doing this? I just noticed the same on one of our competitors listings so It's not just Walmart and the links are item specific. (I have update the image) Z0yqKtO.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BWallacejr1 -
Learn Local SEO
What are best local SEO practices 2013 ?? to get website on top of all major keywords ???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
Branded Anchor Text, Exact vs. Non-exact Match Domain
Hello, For NLPCA.com, when you search for "NLP California" in Google,the letters "nlp" are bolded in the SERP URL and so is "ca". See here. This is because "ca" is an abbreviation for "California" Thus, this is not an exact match domain but it is close. What should our branded anchor text be? I want to change the anchor text profile to 98% branded anchor text. The 3 names our company goes by are NLP California NLP Institute of California NLP and Coaching Institute Let me know if we should not use one or more of these names for branded anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Question about local SEO when you serve many more cities than you have brick and mortar locations
My URL is: http://www.mollysmusic.org for the record.I run a music school that serves in-home lessons to a whole slew of cities. Since I only have 3 brick-and-mortar locations, I can't make google local profiles for all the cities served, but I want to get seen by those people searching in their own cities. Right now, our biggest competitor, takelessons.com, is top ranked for every single city you can think of, because they have individual web pages for every city served. Their content is repetitive and scrapey, and to me, that says "doorway page" which supposedly can get you de-indexed. I'm reluctant to do that because I'm afraid I'll get banned, but I have to compete. I also want a strategy that can scale when we move into new areas. Is there something that makes TakeLessons's content NOT a doorway page? What's the best practice for getting ranked in multiple individual cities if you run a service? Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mollysmusic0 -
What on-page/site optimization techniques can I utilize to improve this site (http://www.paradisus.com/)?
I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Melia0