Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks, will do

Thanks Miriam

If I log out of normal moz, and then click the login button at the bottom of this thread and login, then I am Q&A logged in. Weird.

Yeah I thought Miriam Ellis was the subject matter expert and I've copied her advice below (there is no solution) from 13 months ago. I'm kinda hoping that there is updated advice and even perhaps a solution?

"It's important to understand that no matter how many citations you get, you are at risk of their 'power' being split between you and any other business sharing the address, and simply confusing the bots further. It might be helpful to visualize being a bot here. If you see 50 references around the web to Jane's Hair Salon, 23 for Jenny's Yoga and 72 for Bill's Martial arts all stating that they are located at 123 Main street, who do you believe? Therein lies the problem and it's not going to be a winning situation for any of the businesses mixed up in this. Google has never handled the concept of shared addresses well. Unfortunately, in the real world, people do share addresses, but Google's system is not designed to cope with that, so either one abstains from participation in Google's local products, or finds a way to comply with them." - Miriam Ellis Oct 13 http://moz.com/community/q/local-seo-how-to-handle-multiple-business-at-same-address

Thanks Moosa. We use PO Box numbers.

Thanks for your quick response Federico. The issue is New Zealand does not use Suite #s at all.

My apologies for not responding to the responses earlier, I got caught in some sort of odd logged out bug for just the Q&A section

New Zealand does some good things, for example we grow hairy fruit called Kiwifruit, put other fruit into bottles and call it Sauvignon Blanc, but we can also be a bit, well...fruity.

My problem is that when we Kiwis list out NAPs we do it like this: ABC Company, Level 1, 123 Example St. Now the fruity bit is we don't have Suite #s, there is never: ABC Company, Suite #400 Level 1, 123 Example St. We just expect you to go up to level 1 and bl@ody well find the office thanks very much (yea there are signs).

It seems like a Local SEO shared office situation but it's the whole floor! I'm worried if I get an office in an office building then I will have my results merged with Extremely-Boring-Accountant and Angry-Lawyer who happen to be on the same level.

What's a Local SEO aware guy to do?

Thanks Gregory, its a tricky question.

I'm thinking c). That way I also get more traffic to the page which helps with CRO, remarketing etc. I don't have to worry about cannonical links and admin of many pages. Also having one SEO page for a product probably outweighs the NAP local SEO advantages.

Any thoughts?

I've refined this to a new question here:
http://moz.com/community/q/should-each-physical-store-have-its-own-ecommerce-store-on-subfolders-or-share-a-single-national-one

Each store has its own subfolder (in my mind this hasn't actually happened yet ) on the main head office domain i.e. maindomain.com/localstore1 , maindomain.com/localstore2 etc.

I am happy that this is the best structure for SEO purposes. I like the local SEO advantages to it as each store can have its own NAP and show its own inventory. However I am worried that each store having its own ecommerce site will lead to duplicate content issues.

So I am having a rabid debate with myself as to whether each store should:
a) have its own ecommerce website i.e. maindomain.com/localstore1/ecommercestore
b) have its own ecommerce website i.e. maindomain.com/localstore1/ecommercestore with each product and category page having canonical links to the corresponding page on the main ecommerce website i.e. maindomain.com/ecommercestore 
c) just have one ecommerce website with local stock shown e.g. maindomain.com/ecommercestore/productpage shows in an inventory in a line (below the price or such like): " localstore1 (3 items) localstore2 (0 items)"
d) just chill, inventory stock-outs happen just don't worry about showing local stock

And its not good to have internal rabid debates, so I'd like to ask the wider moz community. For bricks and mortar stores (branches or franchises) how would you set up ecommerce stores? Thanks.

Interesting @EGOL. You've decided to do web article pages, not blog posts. I guess this is because you've wanted to make have a long comprehensive page and a category page will just not offer enough space?

And you haven't used a blog post because you don't want comments mucking up the keywords?

Thanks for your response Gregory. Funny blog post, like the way you use apples.

The phrase "short head" is sometimes called short tail, the left side of the long tail graph with "chunky middle" the middle but not yet the tail.

I guess my question is whether anyone has been successful with getting links to category pages with good content vs blog posts/articles with good content?

I'm targeting short head and chunky middle keywords for generating traffic to an ecommerce website. I guess I have two options both with great content:

1. blog posts
2. category pages with content (essentially the blog post).

On the basis that it is great content that gets links, I would hope that I could garner links into the heart of the eCommerce website by doing this through option 2: category pages.

Any thoughts on blog vs ecommerce category pages for tageting keywords?

Thanks Linda. I missed that thread (ironic given we are in a SEO type community ).

The store is simple retail which sells products not services. Each store has a limited amount of inventory, so you don't want a customer going into one branch to pick up a product based off a head office ecommerce website as it might not be there.

I'm now thinking:

• one website with folders (General SEO)
• each folder has its own ecommerce website and location page (used for Local SEO) with different NAPS at the bottom

Would that be correct?

Thanks Patrick, very interesting response. Would you mind providing a link to the discussion web page?

Just to make sure I understand your answer:
1. you would have subfolders for each store
2. you would have a full e-commerce website on each subfolder for each "substore"?

I have a situation where there are 12 stores in separate suburbs across two cities. Currently the chain store has one eCommerce website. So I could keep the one website with all the attendant link building benefits of one domain. I would keep a separate webpage for each store with address details to assist with some Local SEO.

But (1) each store has slightly different inventory and (2) I would like to garner the (Local) SEO benefits of being in a searchers suburb. So I'm wondering if I should go down the subfolder route with each store having its own eCommerce store and blog eg example.com/suburb? This is sort of what Apple does (albeit with countries) and is used as a best practice for international SEO (according to a moz seminar I watched awhile back).

Or I could go down the separate eCommerce website domain track? However I feel that is too much effort for not much extra return.

Any thoughts? Thanks, Bruce.

Thanks Thomas

Thanks for sharing Dana