Same website, seperate subfolders or separete websites? 12 stores in two cities

[BruceMcG]

I have a situation where there are 12 stores in separate suburbs across two cities. Currently the chain store has one eCommerce website. So I could keep the one website with all the attendant link building benefits of one domain. I would keep a separate webpage for each store with address details to assist with some Local SEO.

But (1) each store has slightly different inventory and (2) I would like to garner the (Local) SEO benefits of being in a searchers suburb. So I'm wondering if I should go down the subfolder route with each store having its own eCommerce store and blog eg example.com/suburb? This is sort of what Apple does (albeit with countries) and is used as a best practice for international SEO (according to a moz seminar I watched awhile back).

Or I could go down the separate eCommerce website domain track? However I feel that is too much effort for not much extra return.

Any thoughts? Thanks, Bruce.

[BruceMcG]

I've refined this to a new question here:
http://moz.com/community/q/should-each-physical-store-have-its-own-ecommerce-store-on-subfolders-or-share-a-single-national-one

[BruceMcG]

Thanks Linda. I missed that thread (ironic given we are in a SEO type community ).

The store is simple retail which sells products not services. Each store has a limited amount of inventory, so you don't want a customer going into one branch to pick up a product based off a head office ecommerce website as it might not be there.

I'm now thinking:

• one website with folders (General SEO)
• each folder has its own ecommerce website and location page (used for Local SEO) with different NAPS at the bottom

Would that be correct?

[BruceMcG]

Thanks Patrick, very interesting response. Would you mind providing a link to the discussion web page?

Just to make sure I understand your answer:
1. you would have subfolders for each store
2. you would have a full e-commerce website on each subfolder for each "substore"?

[LindaBuquet]

Hi Bruce, I just replied in another thread and said:

"Many local businesses and SEOs have a Google strategy of divide and conquer.
With Google Local a better strategy is "United We Stand!" (One site.)

Miriam and I went on to give a lot of other advice that relates to your situation. Here is the link to the other discussion:
http://moz.com/community/q/a-branded-local-search-strategy-utilizing-microsites

[WhiteboardCreations]

Bruce,

I posed this same question a few months back as I have clients with offices in different cities and a couple who are HQ'd in one city with sub-stores in other locations, but only have 1 website. My question was along the lines of "Do we create microsites to target each of the cities or build sub-folders?"

The overall opinions were: 1) Building sub-folders for each location/store is the most effective; 2) Microsites are still websites to be managed which can be a pain; 3) Google could get confused as to which of the brands stores is the Authority Domain if using microsites and could hurt the main website; 4) Build out more content through the website's blog (get a blog on the main website if not already) to target more local keywords for SEO; 5) Build out your inner-linking for the respective store's pages; and 6) Submit local citations to the inner pages to help build Page Authority from the root domain.

Hope this was helpful and stick with getting as much attention to the main domain to build its Authority and you will see the other sub-pages climb SERPs! We are applying the above mentioned strategies currently and love it!

Patrick