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Thanks Jim

Sometimes the links pointing to the homepage make it strong enough that even a slight mention of the words can make it more relevant than the page in the eyes of the search engine. Other times older versions of a page were redirected to the homepage rather than page > page. What also happens sometimes is that duplicate content on a page will cause a page to be hidden in search results and Google will instead return the homepage in its place (usually in a lower position than the page would have been.)

Of all the stores?  If you have access to the overall owner of this have them deal with the store manager.

There is a ton of passion about this topic online, and often between marketing departments in countries. In a perfect world, for Google, you would have local content (unique by country), local domains (.ca and .com), local addresses and phone numbers, and the physical servers would be in the country. This has to be balanced against multiple investments, management of the two, existing rank of a domain or domains, plans for multilingual in both countries (spanish, french), expansion to new countries, etc. If you already have a .com domain (or .ca) which is well performing in both countries, don't split it. Build a sub off of it (.com/en-ca, .com/en-us, etc.). Building off of one domain, with folders beneath it, provide nice flexibility for management, and can reduce costs. Additionally, you can target the content well. You may, and emphasize may, lose some SEO value, but this can only be quantified at your business level versus effort. Mozilla shows a nice example of one site with languages per folder. (No you are likely not Mozilla, but you get the point). Your best efforts are to focus on content, solid architecture, great conversion rates, and ensuring localization of targeting and linking. These will have larger impact than folder v. TLD. (IMHO).

Thanks again Ryan!

Hi There! Chances are, this is going to be an uphill battle; the ability to compete successfully with the likes of Google's own location-based packs of results + organic results featuring individual business websites + powerhouse directories like Yelp is going to depend on the resources you have to put into the development and marketing of the directory. The competition is stiff for anyone entering the directory scene these days, but if you're creating something that doesn't yet exist, the best hope would be in becoming THE authoritative source for the niche. What can you do that will add value users can't get from Google 7-packs or Yelp's reviewers? What kind of content can you create that will earn you a spot amongst these already-established players? These would be the questions I would be asking myself to determine whether I wanted to dive into this new venture.

Both Ryan and Linda have great answers for your specific issue. As a new customer, I highly suggest signing up for our webinars that walk you through how to use the tools and real life examples with them.

Hi James, I agree with Richard on this - you want to aim for the traffic that is most relevant to your client. For a small business, ranking organically just for health insurance is likely to be out of the question, but ranking locally for health insurance in his small town should be achievable.

Hi There Red! What is the client's actual relationship to customers in Boston? Is there one? A few more details on this might help.

Thanks so much for your responses! This was helpful advice.

Either structure is fine. Exact match domains still work (somewhat) but they'll continue to fade as time goes on. You'll have a better chance at getting results if you rely more heavily on producing good on-page, rather than an exact match domain to get you rankings. My advice would be 250 words with your targeted keyword used twice and 2-3 LSI (latent semantic index) keywords to supplement it once each. Feel free to Tweet me at @StelinSEO if you have any questions

Hi Richard, I understand that it gets posted about in fair detail , but I do feel that the issue of when trying to create a branded enterprise for an SMB that's trying to move toward franchising is typically not addressed. This was a particular situation I was inquiring about not just a general inquiry about subdomains versus subfolders.

I appreciate the help. I do build quality pages. for the most part. I would not include a wall of zip codes or other spam text. I would write a 2-300 page paragraph outing the services a little more and just using 1-3% keyword density and maybe throw in some h3 tags with it.

Also useful: https://github.com/phanan/htaccess.  Cheers!

Hi Brian, Good for you for discovering these. The process I would recommend would look like this: Create a strategy for launching a set of new, excellent pages that cover the basics without needing to cover every possible combo as these duplicate/thin pages are likely trying to do. Launch your new pages. Delete the old ones and say, 'good riddance!'

Hi Joshua, Good for you for letting the client know that duplicate content landing pages for the cities are not a good idea. If the client is rural and the competition is low, I honestly wouldn't be recommending city landing pages at all in this scenario, unless their is a genuine reason for the business to be describing its activities in cities B, C, D, etc. Again, without knowing the nuances of the specific business, it's hard to give great advice. So, I can only take a general stab at this. Let's say the client is a farm supply store located in Sonora, California. They are the only farm supply store within a 20 mile radius, and they want to be sure that customers in neighboring communities like Angels Camp, Jamestown, Colombia and Groveland know they exist. I would likely recommend a strategy like this: Optimize all key pages of the website for product/service terms + Sonora Earn testimonials from the farm store's loyal customers who come to them from various towns and include these throughout the product/service pages, including the name of the town the customer comes from. Build citations for the Sonora-based store Put a blog on the site and, on a modest basis, blog about industry-related events in the all the surrounding towns. Good content for the blog would be things like planting forecasts for the various towns at the different mountain elevations, coverage of farm stands, rural fairs, bake sales, mills, large animal vets, farming demonstrations, school gardens and anything else that relates to agriculture taking place in the neighboring communities that shop at the farm store for products. Consider offering town-specific sales, contests and other promotions. Given the rural location and low level of competition, this would likely be all the business would need to do to become very dominant for its goods and services within its own city and in the neighboring communities. It should not be necessary in any way to create those thin, duplicate content pages. A modest but well-planned effort should be all this business needs to succeed.

Hi Miriam Thanks very much for your response. Much appreciated. The reason I asked about this particular issue is that a client's site is slightly below this one on key searches even though it beats it on nearly every criteria in OSE (authority, links etc). Therefore I am looking at any other factors - such as this url issue - which could be making the difference. Thanks again Neil

Awesome, thank you

You're welcome

Hi Zachary, Almost across the board, Local SEOs will recommend the single site approach for the multi-store scenario. Recommend that you check this article out: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide ...and that you do a close study of how REI.com handles their multi-location business on their website. Especially look at the effort they put into making each location landing page on their website unique. Hope this helps!