To subdomain or to subfolder, that is the question.

[insitemoz1]

Hi All,

So I have a client that has two restaurants that they are wanting two sites for. Right now they have one site for their two locations that ranks pretty well for some bigger keywords for their style of food.

With them wanting two sites, i'm struggling on whether we should just build them all within one site and just use separate folders on that site restaurant.com/location1 & restaurant.com/location2 with a landing page sending you to each, or if we should split it into subdomains. The content will be roughly the same, the menus are identical, i think each branch is just owned by a different family member so they want their own site.

I keep leaning towards building it all into one site but i'm not sure. Any ideas?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

It's quite confusing the way you asking this question - they want two websites, but you gonna make one website? I understand you can use subfolders or subdomains, but if they are exactly the same restaurant, will they have different content? Do they want different designs? If so, what is going to be on main domain?

My suggestion would be to do one website with two location pages. This way, since content is the same they won't have duplicate content issues and it won't be confusing to users in case of different websites with different designs for the same restaurants.

Hope this makes sense.

[4RS_John]

There's a business I work with as a web dev that has 2 nearly identical sites - one for their E-commerce business and the other for their local business. I haven't done a full SEO analysis on the sites, but I can tell you it's not working out well SEO-wise - they're pretty buried, and I would bet quite a bit it's because of duplicate content.

If the two restaurants are truly different, each should have its own website, with its own content, on its own domain. If the only difference is the street address then there should be 1 website with a "locations" page showing how to get to each location. If they're a bit different but share a name, I would build single website, but have a page, or couple of pages about each location, (so, I would have location-specific info in a folder, eg. restaurant.com/location2/the-chef). Does that make sense?

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Alex,

Since you're talking about subdomains rather than separate domains and you mention "their style of food", it sounds like they're basically the same restaurant, just in different locations and owned by different family members?

If that's the case, having a separate landing page for each location is the way to go. This means you've only got one lot of content to write rather than 2 full websites and you only have to worry about building a single link profile as well.

You wouldn't even need different subfolders to separate these two, just a landing page for each. The menus are the same, the About Us page probably doesn't need to be any different and the Contact Us page can just offer details and/or a form for each on the one page. Really, the pages you'd need would probably look something like this:-

• Home page
• Location 1
• Location 2
• Menu
• Contact Us

You may want to create other pages on there of course but these would be your basics. If you went down the subfolder route and had a location, menu and contact page for each, that's just adding complexity and redundancy that you could do without. At the very least, the simplistic approach is going to help your crawl budget since engines won't be crawling 2 of everything.

Think of it a bit more like a franchise - present one brand on the site and have a landing page for the locations.

Hope that helps!

[BradsDeals]

I agree with this approach, but I also would be trying to dig into _why _they think they want a second site instead of just coming back with a recommendation. What do they think that will accomplish for them? Sometimes clients will ask you to do something that they think will solve a problem when really they should be asking you how to solve the problem, and the situation as he's described it totally feels like one of those times to me.