Different Geographies - New Domain or Subdomain?

[JaredDetroit]

I have a site that is successful on the SERPs for a certain geography, let's call it City A (I'm sure you can't tell what it is from my username). I'm moving to a new city in another state so I will be building my business in this area (City B).

Should I create a new domain for City B with CityBWebsiteDesign.com or should I create a sub-domain called CityB.BrandableCompanyName.com and just redirect CityBWebsiteDesign.com to the URL for offline marketing purposes only?

My current website BrandableCompanyName.com has some authority with Google. Will it be better to building something on the sub-domain and get any sort of cross-benefits or are there really no benefits to be had between sub-domains? The benefit of going with CityBWebsiteDesign.com would be having a keyword rich URL but I would basically be starting from zero with building authority.

Specific experience you've had with this or cited examples would be great for the discussion!

Thanks,
Jared

[tomcraig86]

If you are not leaving the company behind, I would suggest flipping the current brandedsite.com to the new city. If you didn't start with CityAWebsiteDesign.com, then you shouldn't need CityBWebsiteDesign.com.

If you need to change the URL in some way to reflect this change... perhaps you're keeping the old office open etc, then the best option would be a subfolder, just brandedcompanyname.com/City-B-website-Design

That way you keep the domain authority of your website, and you get the benefit of the keyword rich url.

Hope this helps!

Tom

[JaredDetroit]

I'm not abandoning the city or the website so I don't really want to change the main website to the new city.

If I basically create a whole new website with content and SEO for CityB at BrandedCompanyName.com/City-B, would it be more difficult to rank for 2 separate geographies on the same domain? I'm basically thinking that this "subfolder" for CityB would have it's own site with unique content and I could point the CityBWebsiteDesign.com to this subfolder just for offline marketing purposes.

Does this seem to be the best solution?

Thanks,

Jared