Creating a Wordpress Multi-site - Should I have separate Domains or use Subdirectories?

[TylerAspen]

Hello,

I have a company building out a website and wanted to get the community opinion on how we should set-up the domain network (separate domains or subdirectories).

Our company has several locations across the country and really act as their own entity in those locations (Austin, Norman, College Station, etc.). Currently, we have all the locations under 1 domain like so... maindomain.com/our-locations/norman. This clearly isn't they way it should be set-up and it was done a long time ago, so we are changing to either:

1. Separate Domains already purchased
2. Subdirectories such as maindomain.com/norman

I would like to know what would be the best strategy for our communities in regards to SEO?

Thanks!

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Tyler

You should go with the second option. It is by far the best for SEO. Have the main company information on the main site and then have the different locations as a first sub-directory as you have written it:

maindomain.com/norman

Make sure that the new city pages are rich with local information - drop in a photo of the city centre with an alt tag 'Norman' - talk about the main attractions of the town and flesh out the pages with contextually rich local information. Don't simply copy content from the main site as the duplicated content will drag the page down SERPS. If you do this correctly you will have a very good chance of ranking No.1 for your service + City in search.

Don't even think about setting up domains for each city - in fact, go and sell/delete them now!

I hope that helps - oh and don't forget to use Google my business to set up Googe local for all locales! and get plenty of local citations for each city. It should really rock if you do that!

Regards Nigel

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[MiriamEllis]

Hi Tyler,

I second Nigel's vote for the single domain approach. In a nutshell, it's nearly always better to build your brand on a single website than to try to spread your efforts across multiple websites. Local SEO best practice is to stick with a single domain on which you build out the necessary pages to reflect your various branches, linking to them from a high level menu or a combination of a store locator widget + an accessible html menu somewhere on the site so that you can be sure these pages get indexed.

[TylerAspen]

Thank you! That makes sense to me on the SEO side.

Any domain issues when it comes to AdWords tracking?

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Tyler,

Can you be more specific? What types of issues?

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Tyler

You would simply direct the traffic to each of the folders/cities so the cost of Adwords could easily be assigned to each separate office.

There is nothing else to worry about

Regards

Nigel