Best domain setup for network of locations

[searchcityusa]

Hi there!

I am looking for some industry expert weigh-in on best practices to how to best approach the business scenario described below to bring in some outside confirmation of our approach for a client.

Tim runs a business,timsbusinesswebsite.com. Tim's business has between 15 and 30 individual locations in large cities across the United States. Unfortunately, the approach to each individual location's digital marketing has been inconsistent.

• Some have a unique URL for their location (e.g.timsbusinesswebsite.com/new-york-city/)

• Some have a subdomain (e.g.chicago.timsbusinesswebsite.com)

• Some have a separate domain altogether (e.g.timsbusinesswebsiitelosangeles.com)

Which of these three approaches would best build the best foundation for the business in local and national rankings from an SEO standpoint and why?

[MiriamEllis]

Good afternoon!

My ideal approach is that you go with a single website at domain.com with the location landing pages all being domain.com/chicago

It's the simplest method with no drawbacks of any kind. Subdomains can get you into this messy controversy:

https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-google-fight-subdomains-subdirectories-25126.html

But, your scenario has an extra layer of complexity built into it, in that your client has also built out multiple domains. That makes this such an 'it depends' scenario, that it's unlikely you'll be able to get a really authoritative answer from anybody who isn't looking at your client's actual domains.

So, what I can say here is that, ideally, I'd recommend a single website with all content on it and links to it going to strengthen the overall authority of the domain and brand instead of being divided up across multiple domains. I think this is the strongest approach, in terms of SEO, branding, consumer experience, ease of management, etc. But, I will say that there are some cases in which, if the client is earning significant revenue from multiple domains, it could be not-the-best idea to tell them to take those down or even re-direct them. On the other hand, sometimes the client has simply created a spammy mess, sometimes even for the purpose of fooling search engines and customers, in which case, you may need to make overhauling all of their web assets a prerequisite of working with them. Definitely, this is an "it depends".