Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Local SEO
    4. Local Website Optimization
    5. Should Multi Location Businesses "Local Content Silo" Their Services Pages?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Should Multi Location Businesses "Local Content Silo" Their Services Pages?

    Local Website Optimization
    2
    4
    1655
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • formandfunctionagency
      formandfunctionagency Subscriber last edited by

      I manage a site for a medical practice that has two locations. We already have a location page for each office location and we have the NAP for both locations in the footer of every page.

      I'm considering making a change to the structure of the site to help it rank better for individual services at each of the two locations, which I think will help pages rank in their specific locales by having the city name in the URL. However, I'm concerned about diluting the domain authority that gets passed to the pages by moving them deeper in the site's structure.

      For instance, the services URLs are currently structured like this:

      www.domain.com/services/teeth-whitening (where the service is offered in each of the two locations)

      Would it make sense to move to a structure more like

      www.domain.com/city1name/teeth-whitening

      www.domain.com/city2name/teeth-whitening

      Does anyone have insight from dealing with multi-location brands on the best way to go about this?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • MiriamEllis
        MiriamEllis Subject Expert @formandfunctionagency last edited by

        Good morning and Happy New Year!

        Either way or both, with the internal links, is fine 🙂

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • formandfunctionagency
          formandfunctionagency Subscriber last edited by

          Hey Miriam, thanks for the great answer!

          I don't anticipate the business to add any additional locations and 1-2 services aren't offered in both locations, but either way, very solid advice, I'll be taking it.

          While reading over your response and researching around, I also dug up one of Phil Rozek's posts about city pages. He recommends linking from each service page back to each location page. You recommended linking from each location page to each service. I think both make sense from an ease of use standpoint. Do you advocate doing one over the other or do you feel linking both ways makes sense/matters?

          MiriamEllis 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • MiriamEllis
            MiriamEllis Subject Expert last edited by

            Hello There!

            Good questions you've asked here. My standard advice for multi-location business models is that you have:

            1. A page for every location

            2. A page for every service or product you offer

            3. Links from #1 to #2

            What you're describing here, of creating a whole set of city-optimized versions of each service you offer even though the service is identical across all locations, is an option I don't particularly advocate. You could go this route, but here are some problems I see with this approach:

            1. I have 10 services and my business expands to 100 locations. What a mess it would be to have to create unique content for 1,000 city-optimized service pages that are all actually saying the same thing. It's just not going to be sustainable for most businesses to do this.

            2. I can't really say to myself that I'm creating these page for people. I'd feel I was doing it all for search engines, and (like Google) I don't really feel comfortable with that approach to marketing. My customer can be served just fine if my landing page for city 1 links to my page for service 1. If the service is the same for all customers at all locations, the only reason I'd create thousands of iterations of combinations of service+city would be for search engines.

            So, rather than take this approach, I'd invest the time/money in something else. I'd go with a page for every city and a page for every service and put my budget towards content development and link building for these pages. I'd focus on building the overall authority of my brand in relationship to my topics, because I feel this would result in better ROI than creating a sort of octopus of near-duplicate pages solely in hopes of rankings.

            Hope these thoughts are helpful in creating strategy!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • BFMichael

              In local SEO, how important is it to include city, state, and state abbreviation in doctitle?

              I'm trying to balance local geographic keywords with product keywords.  I appreciate the feedback from the group! Michael

              Local Website Optimization | | BFMichael
              0
            • stephenfishman

              Can I block blexhn30.webmeup.com. Or does it have anything to do with my Moz Local

              I am getting alot of hits from blexhn30.webmeup.com.   My web host says it could be a web service. Is this part of moz local activity?  Otherwise I want to block it. Have you seen this before??

              Local Website Optimization | | stephenfishman
              0
            • RosemaryB

              Applying NAP Local Schema Markup to a Virtual Location: spamming or not?

              I have a client that has multiple virtual locations to show website visitors where they provide delivery services.   These are individual pages that include unique phone numbers, zip codes, city & state.  However there is no address (this is just a service area). We wanted to apply schematic markup to these landing pages.  Our development team successfully applied schema to the phone, state, city, etc.  However for just the address property they said VIRTUAL LOCATION.  This checked out fine on the Google structured data testing tool. Our question is this; can just having VIRTUAL LOCATION for the address property be construed as spamming?  This landing page is providing pertinent information for the end user.  However since there is no brick and mortar address I'm trying to determine if having VIRTUAL LOCATION as the value could be frowned upon by Google. Any insight would be very helpful. Thanks

              Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB
              1
            • micromano

              Listing multiple schema Things (e.g. Organization, LocalBusiness, Telephone, Locations, Place, etc)

              Greetings All, My law office features many pages with what are essentially directory listings (names, addresses, and phone numbers of places, agencies, organizations that clients might find helpful). Am I correct in assuming that using schema for each of these listings might cause confusion for search engines? In other words, are search engines looking for schema on pages or sites to tell them only about the company running that page or site, or do search engines appreciate schema markup to tell them about all the pieces of content on the pages or that site?

              Local Website Optimization | | micromano
              0
            • MiriamEllis

              How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO

              Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!

              Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis
              9
            • eyeflow

              Location Pages and Duplicate Content and Doorway Pages, Oh My!

              Google has this page on location pages. It's very useful but it doesn't say anything about handling the duplicate content a location page might have. Seeing as the loctions may have very similar services. Lets say they have example.com/location/boston, example.com/location/chicago, or maybe boston.example.com or chicago.example.com etc. They are landing pages for each location, housing that locations contact information as well as serving as a landing page for that location. Showing the same services/products as every other location. This information may also live on the main domains homepage or services page as well. My initial reaction agrees with this article: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide - but I'm really asking what does Google expect? Does this location pages guide from Google tell us we don't really have to make sure each of those location pages are unique? Sometimes creating "unique" location pages feels like you're creating **doorway pages - **"Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names". In a nutshell, Google's Guidelines seem to have a conflict on this topic: Location Pages: "Have each location's or branch's information accessible on separate webpages"
              Doorway Pages: "Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names"
              Duplicate Content: "If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one." Now you could avoid making it a doorway page or a duplicate content page if you just put the location information on a page. Each page would then have a unique address, phone number, email, contact name, etc. But then the page would technically be in violation of this page: Thin Pages: "One of the most important steps in improving your site's ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content." ...starting to feel like I'm in a Google Guidelines Paradox! Do you think this guide from Google means that duplicate content on these pages is acceptable as long as you use that markup? Or do you have another opinion?

              Local Website Optimization | | eyeflow
              0
            • Red_Spot_Interactive

              Subdomain versus Subfolder for Local SEO

              Hello Moz World, I'm wanting to know the best practices for utilizing a subdomain versus a subfolder for multi location businesses, i.e. miami.example.com vs. example.com/miami; I would think that that utilizing the subdomain would make more sense for a national organization with many differing locations, while a subfolder would make more sense for a smaller more nearby locations. I wanted to know if anyone has any a/b examples or when it should go one way or another? Thank you, Kristin Miller

              Local Website Optimization | | Red_Spot_Interactive
              0
            • lfrazer

              Local Business Schema Markup on every page?

              Hello, I have two questions..if someone could shed some light on the topic, I would be so very grateful! 1. I am still making my way through how schema is employed, and as I can tell, it is much more specific (and therefore relevant) in its details than using the data highlighter tool. Is this true? 2. Most of my clients' sites have a footer with the local business info included on every page of their site (address and phone). This said, I have been using the structured data markup helper to add local business schema to home page, and then including the footer markup in the footer file so that every page benefits from the local business markup. Is this incorrect to use it for every page? Also, I noticed that by just using the footer markup for the rest of the pages in the site, I am missing data that was included when I manually went through the index page (i.e. image, url, name of business). Could someone tell me if it is advisable and worth it to manually markup every page for the local business schema or if that should just be used for certain pages such as location, contact us, and/or index? Any tips or help would be greatly appreciated!!! Thanks

              Local Website Optimization | | lfrazer
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.