2 Locations | Site Structure | Local Business

[Javed Jat]

Hello Forum Members,

I have a local business which has 2 business locations, I am looking forward for opinions on site structure setups.

• Create a single website and manage with location pages
• Create subdirectory for each location and manage content below it (internal microsite or mirror sites)

i.e www.example.com/edmonton/personal-injury/
www.example.com/calgary/personal-injury/

I did like to understand the pros and cons of each in regards to how Google understands it and how much is it manageable.

Thanks
Javed

 

[Javed Jat]

Hello Members,

Any thoughts on it, please.

Thanks
Javed

 

[Jerem]

Hello Javed, what did you do finally ? I asked a similar question on my last thread but no one seems to have the answer.

 

[carolyn2]

Javed - hello. Not sure why no one has responded. Here's my two cents.

I would not do subdomains - you're then maintaining two different sites - so your efforts of building authority are split and sometimes it's hard to keep them equal. There's a lot of wisdom in building one site (subfolders), one brand and using schema to "explain" that you have two (2) locations to google. I assume you have two separate GMBs. I'd put the home URL in the main URL info section and put the location URL (see below) in the appointment URL

I concur with your proposed URL structure:
domain.com/edmonton/personal-injury
domain.com/calgary/personal-injury

And mirror your GMB services on your website - as best you can - don't be more precise on your GMBs as you are on your site.

Good luck!
Carolyn

 

[Jerem]

Javed - hello. Not sure why no one has responded. Here's my two cents.

I would not do subdomains - you're then maintaining two different sites - so your efforts of building authority are split and sometimes it's hard to keep them equal. There's a lot of wisdom in building one site (subfolders), one brand and using schema to "explain" that you have two (2) locations to google. I assume you have two separate GMBs. I'd put the home URL in the main URL info section and put the location URL (see below) in the appointment URL

I concur with your proposed URL structure:
domain.com/edmonton/personal-injury
domain.com/calgary/personal-injury

And mirror your GMB services on your website - as best you can - don't be more precise on your GMBs as you are on your site.

Good luck!
Carolyn

Thanks you for your reply Carolyn.

Finally, I chose the url structure with the city as paren pages : "domain.com/edmonton/personal-injury "

I think it's interesting because if we have different GMB categories for the same location, we can then add new pages while keeping the same parent page.

Do you think it's fine to let the parent page empty ? (Edmonton in this example)

 

[carolyn2]

Glad you were able to pick one you would work with. As for leaving the parent page empty - no. One way to handle it would be to fill it with local details so it's relevant to the location - you can figure out what works best for you. I might even consider doing a contextual inner link to the personal-injury page.

 

[Jerem]

Would you have by any chance examples of multiple location business websites using this same structure ?

Concerning the parent page, I'm really not sure about the content. What would we use as Title Tag / H1 / H2 ?

When you say filling the page by local details, you mean by that we should write about the town?

 

[Jerem]

Also, would you add schema markup of the location in the parent page as well ?

 

[carolyn2]

Jerem - so many questions!

Yes - for your city page - write about the city - make sure to make it clear which city -

Home page - I would optimize for brand. Local business schema

Location pages - include local schema for area served

Service pages - schema for service provided

Hope this helps and is clear on what you need to do.

 

[Jerem]

Many thanks for your help Carolyn.

I'm not sure I understand the point regarding to local business schema for the city page.

The two URL of the website look like it :
brand.com/city/targeted-keyword/
brand.com/city/

In the second one, as you suggested, I talked about the city. At the end, I mentionned that we just opened a new location there and then added a map with local business schema. Is it wrong ?

For the title tag & meta description of the city page, we keep using city keywords , exactly like we'd like to rank this page for the city name ?

 

[carolyn2]

Lots of good questions - I'm in the middle of an online conference which is making my workload a bit daunting.

Anyways, what I'm saying is optimize the city page for the city - mention things that help establish the topic - supporting keywords and LSI - you can put in a contextual link over to the service page using a phrase including both.

Doing so establishes the relevance of the city information to the service page - I would not put the GMB map location of the business on the city page. Remember a lot of this is going to be subjective. How I would structure it vs what you would do could both be done and both be "right". The goal here is effectiveness - does actual work product explain sufficiently to the algo what each page addresses.

Optimize your service page for both the service plus city - the idea here is a page optimized for a city (e.g. Detroit) vs a page optimized to a service city (e.g. plumber Detroit} - are two different relevancies - don't muddy the water and optimize both pages for the [service city] keyword. The purpose here is spoon fed the bots what you want them to understand about your page.

As for schema - here's what I offered as an approach -

Home page - I would optimize for brand. Local business schema (you can include organization schema and local business schema on the same page)

Location pages - include local schema for area served - schema for your location or city is a different schema a different set of characteristics, if you will.

Service pages - add schema for service provided - this is going also to be a page where you add more than one type of schema - there are lots of different schema groupings - ideally you're layering schema.

Hope this helps.

 

[Jerem]

It does help a lot thanks