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My client has 2 dental offices in two locations. One office is called "Maintown Dental", the other, a new office, is called "Oakdale Dental" (these are not real names to protect client's privacy). He purchased two different domains, say, maintowndental.com and oakdaledental.com. Which is better for SEO:

  1. Have 2 different websites, one under maintowndental.com for Maintown Dental office, another under oakdaledental.com for Oakdale Dental office? But offices have largely the same content, and I understand that websites should not have duplicate content, so it will get difficult to maintain unique content on each website,

or

  1. Have one website under some main "umbrella" domain with the same content, and on that website have a unique page for each location? However, I'm not sure: a) How to pick that umbrella" domain if the 2 offices have different names? b) I’m worried that some made-up “umbrella” domain will not brand the offices accurately, c) One office is older and established, so if we were to combine it with the new office under one umbrella domain, the SEO for the older office will hurt, will it not?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated, Thank you in advance,

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Matt Cuts avised here to give each location a webpage (It could be two domains or within a single domain).

However, In my experience is better to use a single domain because of benefits such as concentrated SEO efforts, less costs, content creation, content management and tracking.

Because there is no real difference you will need to decide between a subfolder vs subdomain structure. Think of what structure makes more sense to the users.

For example:

brand-or-person.com/location (Preferred structure for small business)

or

location.brand-or-person.com (Preferred structure for medium to big business)

Make sure to use in each location page the following:

  • Use Rich Snipets or Schema.org for each address.
  • Make sure to add hours, location, phone number and trading hours (separately for each location).
  • location specific Unique content .
  • Submit location pages to local directories.
  • Make sure to treat each location within its own silo, do not confuse search engines with a homepage with location specific information.
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    There is a definite difference between a dub-domain and a sub-directory. I would not suggest creating a sub-domain for something as trivial as locale. You are right about a single domain. There are huge advantages in this. The list is long including branding. As for offices, a single page each, especially since there are only two offices, would be ideal. You can optimize them for search better including mark-up. Nice answer. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Apr 29, 2016 at 3:15
  • Thank you very much! So, based on both answers above, looks like one website with 2 different location pages is the way to go. Thank you all again!
    – Nina
    Commented Apr 29, 2016 at 4:42
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I am no SEO expert but in my opinion if the services supplied are basically the same then one website would be suffice.

I would host a single website with service differences for each store / office and have each domain name pointing to the single website, a landing page can be setup with each stores logo/name or build it into a single site such as example, https://www.pizzahut.com.au/.

I do not believe doing this effects SEO badly in anyway besides joining the traffic flow to a single source, so it may improve it.

All the best.

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