Advice on Setting Up Multiple Locations

[SundialStudios]

Hello - one of my client's is expanding their business and opening new locations across the country.

I have been planning to setup up the structure as: www.clientsite.com, www.clientsite.com/location1, www.clientsite.com/location2, www.clientsite.com/location3 and so on .

Is there any downside for our SEO by making each of these location1, location2... sites their own individual Wordpress install?

The overall look of each location will be the same (and they will be using the same custom Wordpress theme), but there services at each location will be different (or have different names). I'd estimate there will be very few duplicate pages from the "main" site to each location site.

Thanks!

[aarongray]

We took on a client last year with the same thing but they were a franchise business. They had 45 locations which we made into one very large website. I think 3,000 plus pages now days. The key we worked out was to not have any duplicate pages at all from a content point of view.

Each location we run as its own SEO campaign as to get the best outcome from a local SEO point of view.

We are about to move away from having each location on its on wordpress as it's way too much work to keep updated and when we make changes it's hard.

[SundialStudios]

Thanks Aaron - I hadn't really given updating each site a lot of thought or design tweaks (also licensing costs).

Keeping that in mind one large site would certainly be easier for me to manage.

Thanks!

[gowebsol]

Aaron has a good point - there is a lot of upkeep if you have several installations. WordPress Multi-Site is the logical choice to make that easier, but still....you have to keep all that up and it can be a pain in the #$%.

My suggestion is keep it all in one installation. WordPress is a cinch to organize all the locations in, even if you treat each location as it's own "mini-site". You'll still have freedom to have unique content and structure content for each location.

I highly recommend you use a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or the caching built into a firewall like WordFence (our preference). This keeps the whole thing fast for the user.

[SundialStudios]

Thanks Joey!

Luckily for me, we're running this at WPEngine and using a CDN so it's going to be very well cached and as quick as possible.

I now need to get my head around exactly how I am going to organize everything.

Thanks again for all the advice!