How to handle a future company expansion?
-
One of my clients is looking to start a new company and they are thinking of SEO right from the get go. While this is great for me there are a few issues that I have never really encountered before.
For instance, my client knows that she will be expanding into a different city in the future but wants to generate local traffic to start with. She will initially start with CITY-A before moving to CITY-B one year later.
Which of the following would be a better solution:
1) Have CITY-A targeted on the root domain for one year, build links and grow the site for CITY-A then create two sub domains in one year targeting CITY-A and CITY-B (ie. CITY-A.companyname.com and CITY-B.companyname.com), then make the root domain a generic company site with no mention of location (or mentions of both locations). . .
2) Create the two sub domains now and begin with CITY-A.companyname.com and have the root domain be a general overview of the company and our services without being location specific.
3) Create the root domain (companyname.com) and have that target CITY-A and keep it targeting the initial city, then create a sub-domain in a year to target CITY-B
I keep going between these solutions and seem to have hit a mental block.
What are your thoughts? Any other ideas are more that welcome!
Thanks,
Net66
-
Hi Net66,
Thanks for the further information. So - like an SEO or design firm, your client will basically have to make efforts to get as far as she can with organic. If she was actually an SEO, Google doesn't show those in Local anyway, but if she is competing with local businesses with physical addresses, no matter what she does, she is unlikely to be able to outrank them, but hopefully the work you do with her will enable her to come up below them. Half a loaf is better than none! Good luck.
Miriam
-
Hi Miriam,
The run on paragraph was fine; I was definitely able to read it.
Her business is virtual in the sense that she does not have a physical address and that 50% of her work comes from all over the country. Much like a web designer or SEO some of her work can be done online without meeting the clients.
However, some of her work requires being local to her client. She does a lot of work for events and charities, in which she goes to the event or company to take photos, produce documentation and designs. She tries to offer an in house design and marketing service while working for her own company.
I hope that makes sense?
Essentially, if she was an SEO she would spend a few days a month / week with her client in their office. So while her service has no physical address, it is important that she is local to her client.
Net66
P.S. Sorry for the late reply, we don’t work on the weekends J
Net66
-
Hi Net66,
I'm so sorry my earlier reply posted as one giant run-on paragraph. We've been having a small issue with formatting in the forum. Hope you were able to make sense of it.
As you have guessed, the fact that the client has no actual physical address is going to handicap them every step of the way in the marketing process. Google's definition of a local business is that it has a physical address and local area code phone number and does business face-to-face with its clients. Any other scenario is going to be considered virtual instead of local.
I've just re-read your original post and confess I am confused - in what way is your client's business local at all? If what she is doing is totally web-based with no in person contact with clients, why would she be seeking local traffic in the first place? I want to understand the situation correctly. Feel free to provide further details.
Miriam
-
Hi Miriam, thanks for the reply!
As we are in the UK state is not really an issue. But as you are based in SF and I'm quite acquainted with the West Coast I would say that is the close to having the two locations be Los Angeles and San Fran. Obviously the distance is closer for us, but that is due to the fact that we are a much smaller country.
My client is actually a freelance graphic designer. So they won't have an office to do the usual listings such as Google Places (they are opposed to using their home address for obvious reasons).
As their service is internet based she can work anywhere and wants to target the two cities to gain a larger client base. She is quite well known in her current city, so she should have no issue finding work there while the SEO takes effect.
I think I will make a generalized site targeting City A (San Fran) then when she wants to widen her net, change the main pages to reflect City B (Los Angeles) and add two sub directories for each city. As she works for a lot of charities and events finding unique city based content shouldn't be too difficult.
My only staggering point may be her lack of physical address.
What would you suggest to get around that? Her keyphrases are very competitive and while she is getting work in through other methods, it is always nice to rank well
Net66
-
Hi Net66! Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. Very nice to have a client who is thinking of SEO in advance. If you are dealing with a company with less than 10 locations, it's actually pretty simple to optimize for all of them. I have some questions: 1. Is Company A going to be corporate headquarters with Company B being a subsidiary office, or will both companies be of equal value? 2. Are the 2 cities going to be in the same state? How close are they to one another? Answers to those might help to clarify the situation a little, as specially question 1. Now, until the client is actually moved into building B, local optimization can only be fully done for Company A. So, yes, it makes sense to begin with a well optimized website for Company A. You wouldn't want to confuse the issue by publishing information about the second business until the client is capable of verifying her address there. When the expansion happens, since you are only dealing with 2 cities, you can reasonably optimize a few of the main pages to reflect the second office (homepage, about page, contact page, as well as the footer, tags, etc.) And, of course, you will be doing her Local SEM for the new city, getting her business listed in Google Places et al. That will likely represent the beginning of your work, and the next steps will likely be to start developing unique and distinct content to showcase the two different offices. As I don't know what the business model is, I'm afraid I can't give creative suggestions, but you will need to take a creative approach to begin building out separate content for the two cities on the website. You can choose to do this on subdomains, or you can simply do it with subdirectories. Matt Cutts has said that Google sees no difference between the two. If this were my client, I'd simply use subdirectories because they tend to be a lot easier to webmaster. I hope this gets you off to a good start, but please feel free to return with further details. Miriam
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
-
How do I handle a redirect chain issue pertaining to a page that doesn't actually exist on my site?
I have a page showing up on the insights report as being a redirect chain. This page however does not exist as far as I can tell. It is not on my dashboard anywhere and pointing a browser to it produces a messy page with Wordpress theme error code spit out. How do I track this down to clean it up if the page does not exist within my Wordpress installation? The page for reference is https://butlermobility.com/dealers/downloads. As it stands today the dealers and downloads pages are separate. There is no downloads sub page within the dealers section.
Technical SEO | | NiteSkirm0 -
What if my developers tell me they can only handle a certain amount of 301 redirects?
We recently launched a new site and I felt the need to redirect all of our old site URLs to the new site URLs. Our developers told me they would only be able to do about 1000 before it starts to bog down the site. Has anyone else came across this before? On top of that, with our new site structure, whenever our content team changes a title (which is more often than i had hoped), the URL changes. This means I'm finding i have many other redirects I need to put in place, but cant at the moment. Advice please??
Technical SEO | | CHECOM0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Has anyone used a company to help promote their site
Hi, i receive around ten emails a day claiming they can help you get your site in the top ten in google, now i know most are a load of rubbish but i am just wondering if anyone has used any of these companies for a new site or an old site. I am about to launch a new site after xmas and i am just wondering if any of these companies are worth looking at to help promote the new site instead of doing all the ground work myself. Would love to know your thoughts
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines. To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs. I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index. The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one. I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value. I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages. My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | CABLES0 -
Best Way To Handle Expired Content
Hi, I have a client's site that posts job openings. There is a main list of available jobs and each job has an individual page linked to from that main list. However, at some point the job is no longer available. Currently, the job page goes away and returns a status 404 after the job is no longer available. The good thing is that the job pages get links coming into the site. The bad thing is that as soon as the job is no longer available, those links point to a 404 page. Ouch. Currently Google Webmaster Tools shows 100+ 404 job URLs that have links (maybe 1-3 external links per). The question is what to do with the job page instead of returning a 404. For business purposes, the client cannot display the content after the job is no longer available. To avoid duplicate content issues, the old job page should have some kind of unique content saying the job is longer available. Any thoughts on what to do with those old job pages? Or would you argue that it is appropriate to return 404 header plus error page since this job is truly no longer a valid page on the site? Thanks for any insights you can offer.
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar
Matthew1 -
We're working on a site that is a beer company. Because it is required to have an age verification page, how should we best redirect the bots (useragents) to the actual homepage (thus skipping ahead of the age verification without allowing all browsers)?
This question is about useragents and alcohol sites that have an age verification screen upon landing on the site.
Technical SEO | | OveritMedia0