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 stockAnd 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.
-
Thanks Gregory, its a tricky question.
-
I too think that C is best, but instead of listing the inventory in ALL the stores perhaps you can have them select their local store and then just show the inventory level at that ONE store for the rest of their visit to your store (or until they select a new local store)
Showing the inventory at all stores may be a bit distracting on the page (bad for CRO) and may lead to lots of customer phone calls asking if you can have something from store A sent over to store B for them (which could be a pain in the butt)
-
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?
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
-
Redirecting 2 established websites to 1 new one.
I have 2 websites that I've built up for a few years decent DA. I'm thinking of making one new website and directing the two websites to it. Is Google going to find that suspicious, or will the new site benefit from the DA from both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdShull0 -
How to Implement AMP for Single Blog Post?
Hello Moz Team, I would like to implement AMP for my single blog post not on whole blog. Is it possible? if Yes then How? Note - I am already using GTM for my website abcd.com but I would like to use for my blog post only and my blog is like - abcd.com/blog..............let me clarify Blog Post means - abcd.com/blog/my-favorite-dress Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johny123450 -
Multi URL treated as one?
I had previous asked this question, where the issue turned out to be that I didn't have all the URLs in Google Search console. Whoops! So I have added 4 properties that are really all the same property: https:// https://www http:// http://www I have added all of these. This has raised a few more questions: Can I get Google Search Console to treat these (and even group these together) to show as one property? Right now they are all listed separately. I know in Site Settings you can set a Preferred Site. Even so, they show as separate sites with data separately. Can I merge these? What about Moz? Should I do something similar to see traffic for each of these in Moz? It looks like we are missing a ton of info. Does Moz get this from GSC automatically? What about sitemaps? Can I fix this in sitemaps? Do I need separate sitemaps for each property?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TapGoods0 -
Thin Content, Ecommerce & Reviews
I've been reading a lot today about thin content and what constitutes thin content. We have an ecommerce site and have to compete with large sites in Google - product pages in terms of content quantity are low and obviously competitors all have similar variations of the same product descriptions. Does Google still consider ecommerce sites as with thin content as low quality? A product page surely shouldn't have too much content which doesn't help the user. My solution to start was to get our customer reviews added to the product pages to help improve the amount of quality content on this page, then move into adding video etc when we have resource. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Multiple Domain Names Pointing to One URL
Hi! A company I work with has purchased several (70-something) domain names that are relevant to their business. According to their IT pro, they're currently using DNS to point those domains to our IP address, with a catch-all header on IIS for that IP address. Essentially, we have 70-something domain names that direct to the homepage. I noticed that some have been indexed by Google and are pulling in the meta of the homepage they're being directed to. Is this potentially an issue? If so, would 301 redirects fix this or are we okay with the status quo and the indexing is no big deal? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 199580 -
One Website, Multiple Locations, One Blog?
There's definitely not going to be a "right" answer to this question, but I think it can lead to a great discussion. We are building a website for a client who has two locations, we are going to use a URL structure similar to this: www.Brand.com (this would be a landing page where users would select a location) www.Brand.com/Atlanta www.Brand.com/Boston However, we still want to focus on local SEO - so our deeper URL structure will be: www.Brand.com/Atlanta/Auto-Accident-Lawyer www.Brand.com/Atlanta/Motorcycle-Accident-Lawyer www.Brand.com/Boston/Auto-Accident-Lawyer www.Brand.com/Boston/Motorcycle-Accident-Lawyer The content on those pages will be unique and target local keywords. Each "version" of the website will have a navigation specific to that location. For example, once a user clicks into the Boston website, all of the navigation items will pertain to Boston. However, we run into an issue with the blog. Both locations will be using the same blog content, which ends up looking something like this: www.Brand.com/Atlanta/Blog/Blog-Article www.Brand.com/Boston/Blog/Blog-Article This obviously creates duplicate content. We could do something such as this: www.Brand.com/Blog/Blog-Article However, as noted above, each local version of the website has a separate navigation (this keeps a user in Boston on the Boston version of the website). So have a centralized blog is far from ideal unless navigations for both locations are included - which would allow users to return back to their local website. From my understanding, duplicate content doesn't necessarily "hurt" your SERPs, it simply keeps one of the duplicated pages from ranking. So the question comes down to this, is duplicate content a big enough issue to restructure a website to use a centralized blog?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McFaddenGavender0 -
404 in Google cache for one of my blog posts
Hey Moz People, I'm getting a 404 when I cache: this blog post http://www.inscopix.com/blog/decoding-brain-initiative and I'm not able to see what's causing it. Can someone take a look and let me know if they see anything standing out? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacobfy0 -
One Website - Local + National Ranking
If a client (e.g. a winery) wants to rank both nationally and locally, what are some best practices for doing this on one Website? So the goal is to: Rank nationally for their wines, wine varietals, etc.so they're found by restaurants, distributors, customers (could include national directories, content creation ,etc.) Rank locally for their tasting room and wines for people looking locally or looking at that specific region (this could also include include Google places, local directories, etc.). I'm wondering if the site would need to be subdivided (or "siloed") where one section is heavily focused on national and another is on regional? Also, for the home page, which focus would be most important (maybe national because it's harder)? Thanks a for any ideas! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DirectionSEO0