Additonal web sites or added pages

[wevet]

I have an operation with locations dotted around the country.

Is it more advatntageous to:
1. Set up individual sites SEO tailored to the individual areas
2. Simply add additional pages focussed to local areas to the existing website
3. Both

Or none of the above but you have a bright idea as an alternative

 

[pete_m]

Depends on how much time/money you want to invest, and the level of competition.

Ideally I'd do both, and market each website separately. And register keyword-location domain names for the individual sites.

 

[r1creative]

Hi there,

Ideall both would yield the most conversions. If your on a budget I'd start with a main site that has a seperate pages for each location and SEO those pages, maybe run Adwords to the specific page for additonal targetting.

If you want more advice or to talk to someone about working up a strategy feel free to PM me.

 

[beakus]

I wouldn't do the separate sites. It is going to be very difficult to create decent unique content on each site and if the content is too similar, it is likely that a lot of the sites will not rank at all. Google also are not a big fan of you doing this.

Unless you have a huge amount of time on your hands definitely do not do both. For each area you will have to come up with 2 unique sets of text.

Stick with one site, create a strong brand and have location based pages where relevant.

 

[Deleted member 73538]

Running multiple sites can be more demanding in terms of managing the sites and also promotion/link building.

Ideally separate sites would need to be registered under different names and run from different hosts to create the illusion of each site being independent if interlinking.

I've combined several of my sites into one in the last few years to make development and management easier. I'm targetting numerous geographical areas fairly successfully. Providing your content and internal link structure reflect the keywords you're targetting it will work fine, and build external deep links where possible.

 

[Feature]

2. Simply add additional pages focussed to local areas to the existing website

I'd suggest it is better to have 1 well informed website covering the basic (which applies to all locations) and use subsections for each location instead of having 'splinters' (separate websites) spread over the internet.

Have several pages focussed on each location within the existing website. You can use the following website address format to use for each location: e.g. site.com/london, site.com/bristol etc. This way it will be easier for the visitor to explore other locations on your site as well, increasing traffic for this site instead of having traffic spread through different sites.

Let us know what you decide(d) and what the results are.

 

[G. Lasagne]

How would that work though?
Say you had a page for 20 cities that would mean 20 pages on your nav menu, it would look ridiculous, how would you do it so that people could navigate to the city relevant to them without scrolling down a massive nave menu.

 

[JackieC]

Don't have them on your Nav menu - put them on a wee drop-down box. Select by Postcode or Town or whatever - then whisk them off to the page dedicated to that geo area.

Jackie

 

[WirralPrinters]

Work on building up your existing site.

No point in having many sites with very little exposure/high ranking for each on the net.


Content is the key for a website. Add to your existing site.

As mentioned already, maintaining so many sites would be almost impossible.

 

[Deleted member 73538]

Whilst you may not want to have 20 cities listed in your nav menu, it will be pretty essential to have those links in the footer to tell Google they are important.

If using a drop down menu it will need to employ html, css and javascript rather than a select box any javascript to pass and link juice to your inner pages.

 

[WirralPrinters]

Whilst you may not want to have 20 cities listed in your nav menu, it will be pretty essential to have those links in the footer to tell Google they are important.

If using a drop down menu it will need to employ html, css and javascript rather than a select box any javascript to pass and link juice to your inner pages.

Don't use JS to promote things to search engines - it's not seen.

View a websites' page source using JS to see what I mean - Google for example, will see what you see here

use a sitemap (both types, html and xml).

By all means add them to the footer as suggested with links (gives your visitor a quick nav).

Why not use a flyout for the locations???

 

[Deleted member 73538]

I was thinking along the lines of having a fully formed html menu, largely hidden by css and then appearing as a dropdown with JS.

 

[WirralPrinters]

I was thinking along the lines of having a fully formed html menu, largely hidden by css and then appearing as a dropdown with JS.

Sorry Nice implementation

 

[Feature]

In general I agree with everyone who recommends not to use form dropdowns when displaying locations. Unless SEO is not really much of your concern AND if proven by e.g. tests that conversion rate is higher when using dropdowns compared to any other methods.

It is also possible to use CSS only to create a menu dropdown (not a form dropdown) that expands when hovering over, exposing more options which should all be picked up by search engines. There is no need for JavaScript to accomplish this.

How would that work though?
Say you had a page for 20 cities that would mean 20 pages on your nav menu, it would look ridiculous, how would you do it so that people could navigate to the city relevant to them without scrolling down a massive nave menu.

I totally agree. Having such a long list is detrimental to the user experience.

There are several ways to accomplish this, depending on preference, the current functional design of the site and how the visitor should reach its goal (in this case the location).

One such way is how big chains work, like Sainsbury, Tesco etc. They have a store locator link pointing to a very specific page where either all locations are listed or where people can search for a location and displaying the e.g. 10 closest stores with all details.

Another way is to group your locations if there are many per area. Instead of showing every location in the menu, first show only the areas. For example: London & South East, South West, East of England, East Midlands etc. When a visitor hovers over any of these areas there are different ways to display the results, depending on preferences etc. For example: (1) A list of all available locations, but only highlighting the locations of the chosen area, (2) Only list the locations of the chosen area or (3) show submenu with locations of that area pointing to specific locations, I added an example at the end.

Compared to having all locations listed in an e.g. menu, you might argue that it takes the visitor too many clicks to get to the location. But when you think about it. It is frustrating to look for something that is there but without clear directions. Having clear directions or having the sense that you will find what you are looking for isn't bad at all if it takes a few extra clicks. As long as it doesn't take the user to click like 10 levels deep or requires too much thinking and guessing.


Examples menu:

• Home
• About
• Locations - show all available locations grouped by area or alphabetically when clicking on this link
  • London & South East - either show all available locations grouped by area and highlight selected area or only show this area with its locations
    • Location here - show specific page of the location
    • Another location here
    • Location here
    • Another location here
  • South West
    • Location here
    • Another location here
    • Location here
    • Another location here
  • East of England
    • Location here
    • Another location here
    • Location here
    • Another location here

Just my 2c

 

[G. Lasagne]

Great reply and I agree, however what's the point from a user point of view?
I mean if you sell iPods the user isn't going to look for a page that is specific to there area, they just want ban iPod.

Like wise with local businesses, if my home page says covering all of the north east, I can't then justify a page for every town with exactly the same content, I totally get the benefit from an seo point of view, but i feel it would reduce conversions as the site would become messy and confusing.

If You have 10 different services and you cover 25 areas thats 250 pages, when in fact all the info the user needs is on 10 pages.

A better way would be to duplicate your site exactly except change the domain and all the references to a particular area, however would that cause penalties for duplicate content?

 

[Feature]

Great reply and I agree, however what's the point from a user point of view?
I mean if you sell iPods the user isn't going to look for a page that is specific to there area, they just want ban iPod.

Like wise with local businesses, if my home page says covering all of the north east, I can't then justify a page for every town with exactly the same content, I totally get the benefit from an seo point of view, but i feel it would reduce conversions as the site would become messy and confusing.

If You have 10 different services and you cover 25 areas thats 250 pages, when in fact all the info the user needs is on 10 pages.

A better way would be to duplicate your site exactly except change the domain and all the references to a particular area, however would that cause penalties for duplicate content?

Duplicate content can get you penalized for it indeed.

I think your situation is somewhat different from the OP's situation. What I gather from the OP is that displaying locations is key, not necessarily the products that are available per location.

From your story I can't see whether it would be ordering online or to be able to find a location where an iPod can be bought.

Not wanting to hijack this thread for the OP, might I suggest to post a new thread with more details about your specific situation so that we can comment on that? Every situation is different in approach. There is no 1-rule.

 

[Deleted member 73538]

The above advice is fine based upon the assumption that visitors will be landing on your homepage, but since you're hoping to target multiple geographical areas it will be unlikely that you can optimise your homepage for more than a couple of areas, so unless your website has a massive amount of content and pages from where you can channel link juice to your primary geographic pages, it will be essential to have links to them from your home page.

A drop down css menu shouldn't be seen as your primary navigation tool, but a very convenient method of hiding those links in a compact yet still functional way.

On one of my sites I target nearly 200 primary geographic areas and over 1000 secondary. My homepage is a horrible linkfest, yet I rank on page 1 for a very competitive phrase. But my actual goal is to bring visitors directly to my primary, secondary or content pages.

 

[bdw]

Another discussion on a similar theme here, http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=193447

 

[Feature]

A drop down css menu shouldn't be seen as your primary navigation tool, but a very convenient method of hiding those links in a compact yet still functional way.

I would say, I agree but this depends entirely on the situation. If there are no more than e.g. 10 links or you can easily and intuitively group a few links then the menu will be most likely be the primary menu. If you offer thousands of products or locations, then it is obvious to have a separate menu to distinguish e.g. products and company.

Whether you put all references to the goal (locations) in the menu mainly depends on

• how many links we are talking about
• whether they can be grouped in an intuitive way
• the web design the company has in mind (if any)
• what the stakeholders want

Being able to put them in the menu leaves you lots of room on the homepage to list them there as well.

1.000's of links takes a much different approach than 20 locations or even 5 locations.

There are several ways to have references to specific locations in your homepage, or even on every page without looking like a linkfest, think about random locations or top 5 locations of the day etc. If you really want every possible page to be crawled by Google, then I'd suggest a sitemap too.

In the end it is about what works best for you. If e.g. listing all links on your homepage or every page gets you the best conversion than any other method, who am I to suggest to change it?

 

[G. Lasagne]

Has anyone got an example of a drop down CSS menu ?

 

[pete_m]

Has anyone got an example of a drop down CSS menu ?

Big Yellow are an example of a good way of doing it: http://www.bigyellow.co.uk/

Click on the link "View All Stores" on the fourth box down on the left. All the links are there in HTML (so each one benefits from being on the homepage), but it's in a user-friendly CSS/JavaScript popup.

 

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