Managing Subsidiaries. Should I house them all in a single domain? What about a single social media presence?
-
Situation: My company has 8 subsidiaries. They each have their own niche (IT, Electrical, Roofing, etc...). We also have offices in multiple countries (If that's even a factor).
Questions:
1. Should I establish a web presence for each one? (www.SubsidiaryOne.com) I would then link to these sites from www.ParentCompany.com. The other options are to do something like www.ParentCompany.com/SubsidiaryOne or SubsidiaryOne.ParentCompany.com. We are trying to build the brand of the parent company so I figured that housing everything inside of the parent company domain would help me meet my goal. Each company will have its own unique content, products, blogs, etc...
2. Should each subsidiary have its own social media presence (Its own Google+, Twitter, FB, etc...) or should I house them all under the umbrella of the parent?
Thanks, Alex
-
Alan,
I agree with you and Ash. Providing we are willing to commit the proper resources to support separate efforts like this, I think that the ccTLD is the way to go.
-Alex
-
I'm with Ash on the Internationalization strategy. I would also suggest that if you go with domain.com/countryspecificsection/ then each country specific section should have it's on country / language specific structured markup and Meta data assignment. This will help ensure Google doesn't have to figure it out on their own (because they are a gambler's nightmare as to how they can get mixed signals wrong).
-
My preference is for the ccTLD if there will be a commitment to optimise that domain - usually the smaller countries are sales offices without a proper marketing complement, so they assume that "head office" will look after the website. Head Office usually doesn't have any budget to cater to the subsidiaries, so the ccTLD will be left to its fate.
Hence your choice of company.com/Country will do.
While Bing is not too important, note that its Webmaster tools has an option to mark off such country folders as being different countries. My suspicion is that Google automatically picks up such cues.
-
Ash,
Your response was very informative. Thank you. It looks like you've got a nice amount of international experience. That's great! If the branded TLD in each country is available, should I stick with that vs. Company.com/Country?
-Alex
-
Drew,
Your logic is sound. I will keep this in mind. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew but the company is willing to give me the proper resources to ensure that each individual brand is given the proper attention. At this point it's really going to come down to me asking them if each brand is THAT important. I agree that it would be more resource/time/cost effective to manage one vs. many.
Thanks Drew!
-Alex
-
Alan,
Thank you very much for your response. I will not be linking from every page. I will ensure that those links are housed in the "About" or "Contact" sections as recommended. I would like each entity to operate as its own brand. Each entity is responsible for their own production & marketing efforts so it would be good for them to be totally separate.
I plan on approaching each website as its own. I will not throw up a few pages and expect results. There needs to be an ongoing effort for each entity.
Thanks again Alan.
-Alex
-
Being in Australia I tend to get a good share of multi-national SEO challenges.
Larger, established brands can break all the rules concerning TLDs because they get local authority through their local links and citations. A current client is a major bank with a presence in 31 countries. They just happen to be my bank, so I have observed them over 20 years. They started as a .com with an Australian emphasis and were multi-national for a while. Then they shut down some of the foreign offices. They then decided to populate their .com.au domain and left a complete, parallel copy on the original .com. Then they resumed their global focus and did NOT use their TLDs in those countries because a handful were not in their possession. These are the obscure countries that haven't signed up to the international copyright conventions. Branding is paramount for them, so no amount of SEO advice could budge them.
So their international locations take the format example.com/countryname. Does that work for them? Of course it does. I was in Singapore where I tested for myself from a local PC, so as to remove any hint of my personal history. They do very well. Despite having the duplicate content in Australia, they do very well among their peers.
A former client who has offices in over 60 countries also started as a .com and when they got more serious in the US they realised that they did not rank at all in that country. They had the usual IT-centric excuse not to make many sites, so I left that for them to resolve internally. Is sales more important than some technician's convenience? I hope they got that point. I did recommend a local micro site for the US that would display US-centric customer stories and local news events.
The takeaways here are that local content and local links can overcome any advantages/disadvantages of a gTLD for a multi-national site.
-
Drew,
Thanks for emphasizing the resource allocation consideration. I mentioned it only in a minor way, yet it really is a critical consideration.
-
The real question is, do you have the time, energy and resources to manage more than one website / social media / seo campaign really well? Having worked with companies who tried that approach, it seemed like they split there attention and none of them really panned out. The ones that got the focus did well. I'm not saying you should not do the subsidiaries, but perhaps that can come later, if one area grows beyond what the site can do from a content standpoint, or needs more SEO attention. As Alan mentioned it's about the brand, and in my experience, managing one brand vs eight is more resource/time/cost effective.
-
The founding principle to SEO is brand identification. The more you do to model your web presence after successful major brands, the more you will naturally earn trust and authority big brands earn. That in turn boosts all other aspects of SEO.
To achieve this specific to subsidiaries, you establish a parent company corporate site, and a stand-alone domain for each subsidiary. Every site however, needs to utilize the most sustainable SEO methods possible. You can't just slap up sites with a few pages and expect them to rank or pull in highly qualified visitors without serious focus.
Only link back to the parent company site and other subsidiary sites from your "About", and "Contact" sections unless you believe it's valuable from a visibility perspective to link from every page. HOWEVER if you link from every page, they should be nofollow links. if you do mass volume links from site to site and they're not nofollowed, that leaves you highly exposed to potential algorithm penalties.
If you want each subsidiary to succeed as its own brand you will need separate social channels for each as well. Again though, they'll only be helpful long-term if you have the resources to maintain them in quality engagement ways.
There are many other rules and guidelines (like "keep duplication of content to as near zero as possible") however that's the core concept that addresses your question here.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Forecasting DA increases after merging domains?
Hi all, I wondered if anyone had any suggestions for forecasting DA changes after merging two domains. The context is that we have two sites and there is argument to combine them into one. To cut a long story short, one of the considerations is how much DA might increase if we migrated one domain into the other. Domain 1 has a DA in the 30s. Domain 2 (which we'd redirect) has a DA in the late 20s. Around 90% of the LRDs are 'incremental'. Surely there is a way to forecast what the increase in DA would be if we decided to combine? I haven't found anything online...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rl_uk0 -
Incomplete Redirect for Domain Migration?
One year ago we migrated domain "X" to domain "Y". We did the proper redirects and used Google Search Console. Everything was done by the book. Now when we enter "Site: X" in Google about 650 results listing the old domain still come up. When clicked these redirect to the new domain. My SEO says that the old domain should not be indexed by Google, that these pages with the old domain should not appear. Is this in fact an incomplete domain migration? Our search traffic dropped considerably when we migrated the domain a year ago. My SEO thinks this may explain the drop. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Domain Authority
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone knew how to discover why DA may have dropped? Ours has gone from 26 to 25 - I know it's not much, but I wanted to find the reason. One thing which happened was our developer company wiped redirects, which did impact rankings - would this also have affected domain authority or do I need to review our backlinks again? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
What is better for web ranking? A domain or subdomain?
I realise that often it is better put content in a subfolder rather than a subdomain, but I have another question that I cannot seem to find the answer to. Is there any ranking benefit to having a site on a .co.uk or .com domain rather than on a subdomain? I'm guessing that the subdomain might benefit from other content on the domain it's hosted on, but are subdomains weighted down in any way in the search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Simple ways to boost Domain Authority
Hi, Any simple methods to boost Domain Authority? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
301 of EDM domains
If I buy a keyword EDM domain and 301 redirect it to my site, will I rank better for that keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creaturmedia0 -
Subdomain and domain authority
I have Domain A (main content site, lots of content), with a domain authority of 91, and Domain B (blog of the first site, lots of content), with a domain authority of 82. I'm merging the blog into the main domain. Would it be best to keep it as a subdomain, or under a directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smorrison0 -
Issues with Sub domains for dealers
I'm starting a new SEO project and am feeling a little overwhelmed due to the scale of it. I am not sure where to start and hope that someone has some ideas. Thousands of dealer websites reside as sub domains on gravelymower.com/ (e.g. http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/) The particular sub domain mentioned above is not showing up at all for any searches and is not cached by Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/ I realize that pretty much zero SEO best practices are followed on page and the location is not on the page, but why is this sub domain not even being indexed by Google? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BridgelineDigital880