Ecommerce Site Structure -- "/our_locations" page: helpful or harmful?

[RankAmateur...]

Hello!

We are a retailer with brick and mortar stores in different cities. We have a website (ourbusiness.com), which includes

• a blog (ourbusiness.com/blog) and
• a separate ecommerce site for each store in subfolders (ourbusiness.com/Boston-store and ourbusiness.com/Atlanta-store).
• NB: We do this for non-business reasons and have no choice.

So, this is not like REI (for example) or other stores with lots of locations but one central ecommerce operation.

Most experts seem to recommend a site structure that echoes REIs. IE:

• a home page principally devoted to ecommerce (rei.com)
• includes an Our Locations-type page (rei.com/stores) which links to local store pages like
• (rei.com/stores/fresno)

I understand how this would help REI, since their homepage is devoted to ecommerce and they need a store locator page that doesn't compete with the shopping experience.  But since we can't send people to products directly from our home page, is there any reason for us not to put the store locator function right on the home page?

That is, is there any reason in our case to prefer (A) ourbusiness.com/our_locations/Boston_store  over (B) ourbusiness.com/Boston-store?

As i see it, the extra page (/our_locations/) could actually hurt, as it puts products one click further away from customers, and one link deeper for bots.

On the other hand, it may make the multi-store structure clearer to bots (and maybe people) and help us in local search.

Finally, would it make a difference if there were 10 stores vs 2?

Thanks for any thoughts!

[GastonRiera]

Hi there,

On one hand, my opinion, its a little helpful to GoogleBot, having that folder stating that you have several stores.
So I'd go with A: ourbusiness.com/stores/location

On the other hand, there is no need to increase an extra click to users, all links could be directly to the stores and not making the users to choose. Also, that extra folder, could be used as an internal link page (also called, landing HUB) were you link all your stores. This would also help a little to GoogleBot.

On a third hand, there is no way to forecast how much your traffic will improve. So analyze and take into consideration how much time and effort you and your dev team need for this improvement.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR

[RankAmateur...]

Thanks for the response. I think you boiled it down to the basic questions very nicely.

If you have any research you can point me to to help me understand just how useful the extra page might be to google bot, or (on the other hand) how much traffic we may lose to the extra click, i'd be most grateful for a pointer.

thanks again!

[GastonRiera]

Hi there!

I do not have any resource or study for those statements.

• for the extra clic, it a well known fact that, for any extra clic that the user does, the conversion rate decreases.
• On how usefull is that landing hub, it is something to be experimented in your case. Theoretically it helps, but its really difficult to estimate how much.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR