Subdomain or Subfolder for Locations?

[ATMOSMarketing56]

I have a client who is ranking #1 for every term related to "bathroom renovations (main city)". They have now started to take on dealers/franchisees in neighbouring cities, and each location would now like to be ranking for THEIR cities.

Is it better to use bathcompany.com/location or location.bathcompany.com?

Considerations:

• The site has the address and phone number of the main location listed in the header, so if we do /location you will still see the main NAP.

• Using /location, If someone browses beyond the location landing page, they will venture into pages that target the main city (ex. "Bath Remodelling (Main City)")

• Using a subdomain will mean that we will need to duplicate content such as their image gallery, and we will have to create new content for their service pages or risk duplicate content. (ex. "shower remodelling (city)")

Questions

• By using /location they will benefit from the strength of the subdomain, while using a new location-based subdomain will this mean we will have to start from scratch in terms of domain authority / link-juice?

• Will the NAP in the header affect the ranking of these location pages?

[irvingw]

using subdomains for locations is a technique that spammers took advantage of and as a result is no longer recommended. Use directories/folders or simply targeted landing pages in the same folder.

a) You can code it so that you don't show a global phone number in the header

b) it's your site, you don't have to create links that take the user to deeper location pages if you don't want to

c) Regardless you need to create unique content anyway, if it's on a subdomain or directory it's still using the same template and you need totally unique content for each page, don't just swap out location names.