Hello all, My compnay plans on redoing our website and we were looking for ways to make the site informative, get leads and rank well. We cover about 10 counties for pest management. Would it be a smart idea to have a page for each county or city in a sub domain like "Westchester.nopests.com"? In each sup page we would explain waht services we provide and info about the area. Should we do this by each small city, or by county, or just by state? We hope this would conquer some keywords like "Westchester County Pest Control" and "New York Pest Control"
First of all - very nice site! did you get an agency on the case or have you guys done it? secondly i think it's a great idea to target people and a nice, organisational approach to this would be to use sub-domains. i'm not american so am not sure about your target audience - we don't tend to have "pests" in the UK. but i do think if people are search locally for pest control and their search matches your sub-domain you are onto a winner!
Damn thats a big bug on your homepage! I think you guys should approach the various locations with sub-domains. Also, do you have people doing blog commenting/blog setups for you?
The quicker you can get the keyword in the url the better example.domain.com versus domain.com/example might rank better for the first example if there is tons of competition. I think Digg utilizes the 2nd, as well as myself because it just makes hierarchal sense to me. Westchester.nopests.com/TownnameHere would probably be the way to do it for the first example; I think you can get a better longterm plan with the 2nd option. Nopests.com/NewYork/Westchester/Townname With this second option the hierarchy is very clear not only to the SE's but more importantly to the people. Nopests.com/NewYork - New York Pest Control Nopests.com/NewYork/Westchester/ - Westchester New York Pest Control Nopests.com/NewYork/Westchester/Townname - Townname Westchester New York Pest Control Use the full name of the county (Westchester vs Westchest). Hope this helps.
I somewhat like our site, how ever it is very hard to update because of the lack of a back end. Also, the site does not have a lot of information we would like visitors to see. ..we have a blog, what do you mean by set ups / commenting? -- @GameFriends.com, thanks, I think we will do the nopests.com/New_York/Westchester/townname that makes the most sense, so we would cover keywords covering "New York Pest control" Westchester Pest Control" and even "town name pest control"
Personally, I prefer using folders over sub-domains for content. I believe subdomains should not be used to segregate content, but more so to segregate functionality. like webmail.example.com for email, services.example.com (for web services), secure.example.com for the HTTPS portion of a site, etc. If you have a CMS where URLs are built dynamically based on some graphical representation of your site structure, having the content for the various counties/cities live under the main site usually makes building navigation and breadcrumbs a no-brainer vs having to jump through hoops and create special work around when part of the content exists on a subdomain. However, for the most part, the two (folders/subdomains) are logically equivalent. The only real advantage I see to using subdomains is that sometimes (typically for searches related to your brand or sitename) it might get you an extra listing or two in the SERPs since Google typically only shows at most 2 listings from a single domain on a single SERP page. It sees the subdomain as another site so you might get 2 for the main site and possibly more for subdomains...