Creating a Wordpress Multi-site - Should I have separate Domains or use Subdirectories?
-
Hello,
I have a company building out a website and wanted to get the community opinion on how we should set-up the domain network (separate domains or subdirectories).
Our company has several locations across the country and really act as their own entity in those locations (Austin, Norman, College Station, etc.). Currently, we have all the locations under 1 domain like so... maindomain.com/our-locations/norman. This clearly isn't they way it should be set-up and it was done a long time ago, so we are changing to either:
- Separate Domains already purchased
- Subdirectories such as maindomain.com/norman
I would like to know what would be the best strategy for our communities in regards to SEO?
Thanks!
-
Hi Tyler
You would simply direct the traffic to each of the folders/cities so the cost of Adwords could easily be assigned to each separate office.
There is nothing else to worry about
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi Tyler,
Can you be more specific? What types of issues?
-
Thank you! That makes sense to me on the SEO side.
Any domain issues when it comes to AdWords tracking?
Thanks!
-
Hi Tyler,
I second Nigel's vote for the single domain approach. In a nutshell, it's nearly always better to build your brand on a single website than to try to spread your efforts across multiple websites. Local SEO best practice is to stick with a single domain on which you build out the necessary pages to reflect your various branches, linking to them from a high level menu or a combination of a store locator widget + an accessible html menu somewhere on the site so that you can be sure these pages get indexed.
-
Hi Tyler
You should go with the second option. It is by far the best for SEO. Have the main company information on the main site and then have the different locations as a first sub-directory as you have written it:
Make sure that the new city pages are rich with local information - drop in a photo of the city centre with an alt tag 'Norman' - talk about the main attractions of the town and flesh out the pages with contextually rich local information. Don't simply copy content from the main site as the duplicated content will drag the page down SERPS. If you do this correctly you will have a very good chance of ranking No.1 for your service + City in search.
Don't even think about setting up domains for each city - in fact, go and sell/delete them now!
I hope that helps - oh and don't forget to use Google my business to set up Googe local for all locales! and get plenty of local citations for each city. It should really rock if you do that!
Regards Nigel
Carousel Projects
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
-
Can you use Google Posts to make updates about emergency closures?
A client of mine asked about the new Google Posts feature that can be used via GMB. The question is can you use Google posts to give updates to visitors about emergency closures?
Local Listings | | BigChad20 -
Found a yelp review by unknowing client of webdesigner who made a one page site. bad seo
One page sites are fine and dandy, but if you are a local biz...Just no! Here's my story with a few questions. I did a search on google site:http://eatfullbellydeli.com/ and it resulted in four pages: Main; menu; hello world; category; uncategorized. I'm not a web designer...I do seo. 1.) How rude would it be for me to reach out to the designer to comment and give suggestions? 2.) or should I reach out to the owner. 3.) Or just close my eyes and say "i hate people that take advantage of others"
Local Listings | | Ohmichael0 -
Is it ok to use a mobile phone number for business listings?
Hi all
Local Listings | | coolhandluc
I know the use of 0800 numbers and toll-free numbers are a big No when it comes to NAP but what about mobile phone numbers?
Will google penalise the use of a mobile over the use of a land line? Thanks0 -
Two businesses - using separate suite numbers
I have a client that has an office in a particular suite (Suite 101) at a local address. They rent the space so they cannot just add another suite number. They are going to have two websites for two different businesses run from the same location. They will have separate local phone numbers for each business. Is it too much of a stretch for them to show one as "Suite 101-A" and the other as "Suite 101-B" for their local pages? One of the businesses is very new with few citations at this point. The other has not started up yet, so we have better control of the citations that will be created. I've seen similar questions posted, but not one that addresses this specific issue. Thanks for any advice!
Local Listings | | wcksmith10 -
Local SEO and Sites by Order of Opinion?
Okay, so we were just having a discussion about which sites/directories are the most important to be listed in for Local SEO. Ultimately we were looking to 'sort' these by order of importance for the typical local business. Google My Business Yelp Yahoo! Local Bing Local Foursquare YellowPages.com SuperPages.com CitySearch HotFrog How would you order them? Would you add anything to the list? Thanks!
Local Listings | | ClickMonsterIM1 -
Site: operator and GWT mismatch
On using the site: operator for our site on Google search, I see a large drop in total results. We had around 900,000 pages till yesterday and now I see this number around 350,000! The funny thing is that on GWT, I see that we have 725,000 pages submitted in sitemaps and around 645,000 of these are indexed! Not sure if this is a blip in Google and related to a huge drop in the structured data that we are also seeing in GWT! In addition, there seems to be a drop in rankings on a number of keywords that we were ranking on as well. For reference, the site is mycity4kids.com TIA, Asif
Local Listings | | prsntsnh0 -
How does one increase a site's Domain Authority?
We see that our Domain Authority is hovering around the same mark for over a year now. I have 2 questions - How important is DA? Does it affect your Google Page Rank? What would ideally be the things that we need to keep in mind if we are to increase our Domain Authority? Thanks
Local Listings | | prsntsnh0 -
Local SEO for a company with 3 sites, for 3 different type of businesses
Hi I've been working for an employment lawyer in Sydney for 3 years now, all good, I built many citations and fixed all ones and the website/blog are ranking fine. Imagine I created the citation using e.g Anton Forester Employment lawyers, name, phone and address. Now the client just launched a website about property with the same name/brand and a different business title e.g Anton Forrester Property Lawyer and another 3rd website about conveyancing with the same name/brand and another business title e.g Anton Forrester Conveyancing law. My question is how do I build citations now that the name is different in the 3 cases, 3 websites but possibly the same phone and address? Thanks a lot Cheers Nico
Local Listings | | niclaus780