Local franchise seo strategy. what could be the best practice?

[Technians]

Hello

what Could be the best practice of seo and website optimization for a franchise company.

Business model: Lets say, a company(company.com) situated in a country having stores in different cities (more than 2 stores in some),  provides n number of services depending on store's location. Physical addresses for some stores are available and new stores shall be launched in future.

But, the seo and website pages are needed for those locations at the moment as well.

If I choose a sub folder, to give each store a URL. This is how it should look like

Country level pages

company.com, company.com/service1/ _ _ _ company.com/serviceN/

City level pages

company.com/city1/, company.com/city1/location1/ , company.com/city1/location2/, company.com/city2/ , company.com/city3/

Q1) In case I make each service page specific to a store location for eg. company.com/city1/service1/,  it will create duplicate content issue because content of company.com/city1/service1/ and company.com/service1/ shall be 60% same, except for **meta title,description and contact detail in footer. **

So, the question arises that shall i give canonical to country level main services page i.e company.com/city1/service1/ canonical to company.com/service1/ as it is very hard to make unique content for same services page.

Q2) Or Do I need to rework on my complete website design and seo strategy?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There!

Good questions! My choice would be to have a unique landing page on the website for each physical store. Content on this page would start with the complete contact information for the location, preferably encoded in Schema, and followed by a description of the services provided by that store and any other info that visitors would find helpful. Additionally, if some of the services are complex, you could link from these pages to a set of service (not geographic) pages offering fuller service descriptions. This method will greatly simplify your URL structure as well, so that your urls for the location pages would be:

mycompany.com/cityA

mycompany.com/cityB

etc.

And your service pages would look like:

mycompany.com/serviceA

mycompany.com/serviceB

etc.

There are instances in which a company will build a unique page for every possible combo of service+city, but I would only advise taking that route if you have considerable resources to devote to making the pages absolutely unique and of a very high quality. If you'd be forced to go with thin or duplicate pages taking this route, I wouldn't advise this course of action.

For more ideas, you might like to check out:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hope this helps!