SEO for a franchise business

[acs111]

Were about to embark on an SEO project for a franchise business with about 150 franchises.

Would it be best to give all of the franchises individual domain names or house them under the one domain?

If they were on the same domain would it be worth setting them up with sub domains or with a URL so city.mydomain.com vs mydomain.com/city

Thanks

[clotairedamy]

Hey acs,

Take a look over here. A detailed description and  best practices when  working with domains/subdomains.

Clotaire

[AgentsofValue]

Rand wrote a whole post a couple of years ago about when to go domain vs subdomain vs folder.  It covers things pretty well from a technical SEO point of view:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

When I read your question, it really seems more of a business strategy question, rather than a technical SEO question.  The one consideration is that - would franchisee's take a stronger ownership in their business and their territory if their business was represented by an individual domain name, rather than a sub-folder on a main website.

If you could see people going out and networking, and putting a domain name on a business card, they could probably acquire a lot of local business links in this way (Chamber of Commerce, etc) that would in the long run boost the brand awareness of the main franchise.

Giving each franchisee their own domain name might also help with local rankings, if you can get a domain name that includes both the business function and location in the name (for example PittsburghRugCleaning.com) - since exact match domains still get a boost over other domains that don't.

On the other hand, putting everything as a subfolder or subdirectory would be much less work from a hosting side of things.