How can I use a blog to improve domain authority for a multi-domain business?

Question

Over the past two years, I have had great success with my local, service-oriented business in building domain authority and climbing in the SERP rankings. I believe this success can be at least partially attributed to the blog and practice materials that I've integrated into our site. The content of the blog is useful to both my local target audience, attracting leads directly, as well as the world at large (attracting, hopefully, high-quality backlinks).

We are now planning to expand to other locations. For various business reasons, we are planning to expand as a series of distinct local brands with separate domains, rather than one national brand and domain (at least for now).

My problem is ranking in these other locations. I'd like to take a similar approach, using high quality content to drive traffic and links. Can I successfully use the content I have at my current location, at least the portion which is relevant, to support these new locations?

The options I've considered so far:

1. Spin off my content into a separate domain, which in turn is linked to each of my locations' domains. Not sure what the repercussions of this would be.
2. Syndicate the relevant portions of the content across each location. This seems like a dangerous way to get slammed for duplicate content.
3. Split the content up, so that each location gets a small piece that is hopefully enough to build authority. This seems to me like a situation where I'd be "fighting too many battles", unless I can hire people to continually generate new content in each location.

Are there any other options I haven't considered? Like I said, a single-brand, single-domain strategy is not an option. I'd like to build domain authority for each brand on a separate domain.

Answer 1

Spin off my content into a separate domain, which in turn is linked to each of my locations' domains. Not sure what the repercussions of this would be.

If it is translated into the local language, then it is all fine and even great. Use hreflang to connect such translated content with the original.

If it is exactly the same content, then don't do it. It won't work.

Syndicate the relevant portions of the content across each location. This seems like a dangerous way to get slammed for duplicate content.

On a small scale, you probably would not be penalized, but your main site would likely rank over your smaller/newer site. If a site offers the same content as another, the one with the higher authority wins at Google.

Split the content up, so that each location gets a small piece that is hopefully enough to build authority. This seems to me like a situation where I'd be "fighting too many battles", unless I can hire people to continually generate new content in each location.

That could work. I have a blog which I did not plan to rank at all. It is in a very competitive niche. But, even though it only had 4 backlinks from obscure websites, one of my post reach position #1 and has been staying up there for months.

It is really the quality of your content in the eyes of users that matters, not the amount. Google does not give a bonus for more. It gives a bonus when users like it.