How to Structure URL's for Multiple Locations

[uBreakiFix]

We are currently undergoing a site redesign and are trying to figure out the best way to structure the URL's and breadcrumbs for our many locations.

We currently have 60 locations nationwide and our URL structure is as follows:

www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}

Where {location} is the specific street the location is on or the neighborhood the location is in. (i.e. www.mydomain.com/locations/waterford-lakes)

The issue is, {location} is usually too specific and is not a broad enough keyword. The location "Waterford-Lakes" is in Orlando and "Orlando" is the important keyword, not " Waterford Lakes".

To address this, we want to introduce state and city pages. Each state and city page would link to each location within that state or city (i.e. an Orlando page with links to "Waterford Lakes", "Lake Nona", "South Orlando", etc.). The question is how to structure this.

Option 1

Use the our existing URL and breadcrumb structure (www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}) and add state and city pages outside the URL path:

www.mydomain.com/{area}

www.mydomain.com/{state}

Option 2

Build the city and state pages into the URL and breadcrumb path:

www.mydomain.com/locations/{state}/{area}/{location}

(i.e www.mydomain.com/locations/fl/orlando/waterford-lakes)

Any insight is much appreciated. Thanks!

[customerparadigm.com]

David -

It looks like there are two main options for you:

Keep the same URL structure (option 1), and create category pages that are state-based / area-based, that then have a short description of each location in that geographic area, with a link to their location page.

This is typically how it might be done with an eCommerce site, where you'd have a parent category (i.e. shoes) and then a sub-category (i.e. running shoes).

The downside to this is that you risk having duplicate content on these category pages.

Option #2 would be my recommendation, because you are including the area / state information into the URL.

One company that does not do this well is Noodles & Company.  Their location URL looks like this:

http://www.noodles.com/locations/150/

... where "150" is a store ID in a database.  Easy to pull out of a database table.  Less helpful to the end user who doesn't know that store ID 150 = the one closest to them.

It would be much better to have it listed like:
http://www.noodles.com/locations/Colorado/Boulder/2602-Baseline/

You don't want to go much beyond 4 layers, but it's a better way of indicating to Google and other search engines the location tree.

Also, I'd highly recommend using a rich-data format for displaying the location information.

For example, on the Customer Paradigm site, we use the RDFa system for tagging the location properly:

Customer Paradigm

5353 Manhattan Circle

Suite 103

Boulder CO, 80303

303.473.4400

... and then Google doesn't have to guess what the location's address and phone number actually are.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi David,

Typically, your main landing pages are going to be those that represent the city of location, as in:

www.site.com/orlando

www.site.com/miami

etc.

What I'm trying to understand is if you are saying you have more than one office within a single city (as in orlando office A, orlando office B, orlando office C) and are trying to hash out how to distinguish these same-city offices from one another. Is this the scenario, or am I not getting it? Please feel free to provide further details.