Advice on Setting Up Multiple Locations
-
Hello - one of my client's is expanding their business and opening new locations across the country.
I have been planning to setup up the structure as: www.clientsite.com, www.clientsite.com/location1, www.clientsite.com/location2, www.clientsite.com/location3 and so on .
Is there any downside for our SEO by making each of these location1, location2... sites their own individual Wordpress install?
The overall look of each location will be the same (and they will be using the same custom Wordpress theme), but there services at each location will be different (or have different names). I'd estimate there will be very few duplicate pages from the "main" site to each location site.
Thanks!
-
Thanks Joey!
Luckily for me, we're running this at WPEngine and using a CDN so it's going to be very well cached and as quick as possible.
I now need to get my head around exactly how I am going to organize everything.
Thanks again for all the advice!
-
Aaron has a good point - there is a lot of upkeep if you have several installations. WordPress Multi-Site is the logical choice to make that easier, but still....you have to keep all that up and it can be a pain in the #$%.
My suggestion is keep it all in one installation. WordPress is a cinch to organize all the locations in, even if you treat each location as it's own "mini-site". You'll still have freedom to have unique content and structure content for each location.
I highly recommend you use a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or the caching built into a firewall like WordFence (our preference). This keeps the whole thing fast for the user.
-
Thanks Aaron - I hadn't really given updating each site a lot of thought or design tweaks (also licensing costs).
Keeping that in mind one large site would certainly be easier for me to manage.
Thanks!
-
We took on a client last year with the same thing but they were a franchise business. They had 45 locations which we made into one very large website. I think 3,000 plus pages now days. The key we worked out was to not have any duplicate pages at all from a content point of view.
Each location we run as its own SEO campaign as to get the best outcome from a local SEO point of view.
We are about to move away from having each location on its on wordpress as it's way too much work to keep updated and when we make changes it's hard.
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
-
What Should We Do to Fix Crawled but Not Indexed Pages for Multi-location Service Pages?
Hey guys! I work as a content creator for Zavza Seal, a contractor out of New York, and we're targeting 36+ cities in the Brooklyn and Queens areas with several services for home improvement. We got about 340 pages into our multi-location strategy targeting our target cities with each service we offer, when we noticed that 200+ of our pages were "Crawled but not indexed" in Google Search Console. Here's what I think we may have done wrong. Let me know what you think... We used the same page template for all pages. (we changed the content and sections, formatting, targeted keywords, and entire page strategy for areas with unique problems trying to keep the user experience as unique as possible to avoid duplicate content or looking like we didn't care about our visitors.) We used the same featured image for all pages. (I know this is bad and wouldn't have done it myself, but hey, I'm not the publisher.) We didn't use rel canonicals to tell search engines that these pages were special made for the areas. We didn't use alt tags until about halfway through. A lot of the urls don't use the target keyword exactly. The NAP info and Google Maps embed is in the footer, so we didn't use it on the pages. We didn't use any content about the history or the city or anything like that. (some pages we did use content about historic buildings, low water table, flood prone areas, etc if they were known for that) We were thinking of redoing the pages, starting from scratch and building unique experiences around each city, with testimonials, case studies, and content about problems that are common for property owners in the area, but I think they may be able to be fixed with a rel canonical, the city specific content added, and unique featured images on each page. What do you think is causing the problem? What would be the easiest way to fix it? I knew the pages had to be unique for each page, so I switched up the page strategy every 5-10 pages out of fear that duplicate content would start happening, because you can only say so much about for example, "basement crack repair". Please let me know your thoughts. Here is one of the pages that are indexed as an example: https://zavzaseal.com/cp-v1/premier-spray-foam-insulation-contractors-in-jamaica-ny/ Here is one like it that is crawled but not indexed: https://zavzaseal.com/cp-v1/premier-spray-foam-insulation-contractors-in-jamaica-ny/ I appreciate your time and concern. Have a great weekend!
Local SEO | | everysecond0 -
Multiple keywords in one article?
Hi guys! I will be soon getting my article published in local newspaper (online edition) with DA 50. They told me i can choose whatever anchor text I want. The article is about towing business and my keyword is going to be also "towing". Is it smart to add another keyword in the same article (which is similar and is also a money keyword) ? Thanks!
Local SEO | | Suksinho0 -
How to get listed for specific locations/cities/towns
Best practice?? I have a client that wishes to get found for services in several towns across the UK. They only have 1 physical location I have so far created a blog ( i use easyblog) and put a list of these towns..then added TAGS with the town names (this means each TAG gets a URL too) ..also i need to then monitor in moz pro somehow. Alternatively i could create web pages with additional information and give the URL the town name....however i think the tags will help...any advice welcome.
Local SEO | | CORSOLUTIONS1 -
What markup/schema is "responsible" for location pin in mobile rich snippets?
Howdy, Saw this new(?) feature in mobile rich snippets (attached here). Anyone knows what part of schema (or whatever else) is making this appear? P.S. From all responses, and some thinking, it looks like the answer would be "who knows", as usual with Google. But most likely it would be related to usual LocalBusiness addressLocality itemprop. 0739Z5v
Local SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Should you set an hreflang if the website is only in one language
We have a website, which is written in British English. There are no other versions of the site in different languages and the website only serves a UK audience. We have not set an hreflang tag up. Is this something we would still need to do and what would the benefits (if any) be?
Local SEO | | HubMDP0 -
Correct setup: One business, one website, two bricks and mortar locations
Hi all, we have a furniture business with two physical stores and one website, which has the ability to sell online but we hardly sell anything but we're just about to start Google PLA on a few products, let's say our website is at: nicefurniture.co.uk We have nicefurniture.co.uk/first-location and nicefurniture.co.uk/second-location set up with all the store info, a Google Map, contact info, etc. This is linked to from the footer on all pages. Issue 1: I have been told conflicting things about how to best set up our Google My Business page. One person says set the URL for both to our homepage, nicefurniture.co.uk and the other says point each GMB listing to the store location pages OR we should buy www.furniture-first-location.co.uk as our URL and point the GMB listing to that. To me, that doesn't make sense as we'd be spreading our domain equity with a new domain, surely? Issue 2: How do I get each GMB location to show up in Maps, etc when people search for 'furniture location' or even 'sofa location' or 'dining table location'? Would I need to optimize the store pages on our site? Issue 3: Years ago we did set up another URL, let's say nicefurniture-cornwall.co.uk and on it there are about 500 pages, all with links pointing to our main website. Google Search Console for our main website lists this other website as one of our top linking domains. Does that mean if we remove nicefurniture-cornwall.co.uk we'll risk a drop in rankings? Many thanks for your input.
Local SEO | | Bee1590 -
How to globalize your brand if the name contains a geo-location modifier?
Hi Moz community,_**[Posting for one of our staff members 🙂 ] **_One of our clients has difficulty attracting a national and international market potentially due to their brand name including a geo-location modifier. We believe that it may be a combination of search engine algorithms incorrectly assuming that the brand is location specific as well as human users perceiving this. I can't reveal the brand but a similar example may be "Houston Cheese-makers". This company wants to attract national and international customers and not be restricted to just Houston. It appears that both search engines and human users are understanding the brand to be limited just to Houston. The client does not want to re-brand. The brand also has a Google Plus Local entity verified against their headquarters location in Houston. We have considered the following tasks to help alleviate this restriction: Changing site messaging to include modifiers such as "national", "USA" and "international" (title-tags, meta-descriptions, on-page text etc). Including a testimonial page that has testimonials from multiple international locations (eg "Joe Blogs from Sydney, Australia says..."). Changing the title tag format site-wide from "page-name | Houston Cheese-makers" to an abbreviated version such as "page-name | HCM" or "page-name | H Cheese-makers". Schema tags - is there any specific tags that can send a signal about the global presence of the brand? What other techniques can help alleviate this problem? Is the Google Plus Local page potentially hampering this as well? Has anyone had a similar experience and can shed some light?Thanks so much!
Local SEO | | AriNahmani0 -
Im a big fan of niche web develop/seo companies. I was wondering how many clients can you ethically take on in the same field, located in the same city
How do niche web development companies justify having multiple clients in the same field in the same cities. I would love an explanation on how to justify this, and how many clients in the same field/same city is acceptable. A good example would be an seo company for auto dealers or hotels. Thanks
Local SEO | | aholyman0