What are subdomains for?
Attracting an audience from a specific region to the website is invariably connected with certain difficulties. Creating new regional domains makes no sense if your website is quite small. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to set up regional subdomains. And we will tell you how to do that in this article.
A subdomain is a domain that comes after the main domain. There could be more than 100 of them.
A regional subdomain is a domain that is included in a chain of higher-level domains. Let’s say the main domain is domain.com and this domain may include the new-york.domain.com subdomain. In theory, there could be as many sub-domains as you want, and they can all be filled with different content.
Another option for specifying regionality is by using folders or directories. And although this article is about creating subdomains, I will also talk a bit about folders.
Regional website versions are often created by companies that have multiple offices in different areas, especially if the store/organization/manufacturer has a U.S. delivery service.
Advantages of regional domains and subdomains
The main advantage of the subdomain is the ability to further optimize pages for regional low- and medium-frequency geo-requests. Besides, the regional version improves the website’s overall structure and helps to highlight thematic sections.
If your website has several regions, visitors will see a direct link between the primary website and regional offices, which will also positively affect audience trust.
Disadvantages of regional domains and subdomains
Regional subdomains also have significant disadvantages:
- link mass will be distributed across all regional subdomains;
- you will have to increase the budget to create additional content for a regional website version;
- you will need to increase costs for technical support / SEO / regional domain maintenance.
Rules for creating subdomains
Based on my experience, I have developed several recommendations that will help prepare for the creation of a regional website version and avoid technical errors.
- Navigation. Links to regional website versions should be accessible from the homepage.
- Content on the main domain and regional versions must differ. It would be better if it was completely unique; however, partial repetition is also allowed. If the content is duplicated, the search engines will recognize the regional version as a secondary mirror. Therefore, high-quality content reproduction would be a great option.
- Address. It’s best if the regional subdomain URL includes a mention of the region for which it is intended. For example, a subdomain for New York is new-york.domain.com.
- Subdomain authority. For search engines subdomain is a completely new and blank website. All of the established main website metrics will not go to the new subdomain.
- Content conformity. The content of regional website versions should be relevant to the audience of the selected region.
How can I add a regional website version?
Creating a subdomain
Preparing to create a subdomain involves adding a new section to the main website. You need to add the “Select City” item to the top menu.
- It is best to add the choice of city in the top menu, located in the website header.
- All links must be direct.
Ordering unique content
There is no point in creating regional subdomains without authentic content. Failure to do so may result in your website being penalized for copying.
Adding unique texts, new videos and photos isn’t the only way to make a page unique.
- If you own an online store, you need to add the information relevant to the regional audience: product availability in a particular city, points of delivery in a particular city, and delivery methods for a particular city.
- You can get a unique text by supplementing it. Such as specifying the assortment of goods relevant to the selected region.
- All the contact information must correspond to the regional store/office/other organization.
- If your website deals with services or products, you need to edit meta robots parameters on pages of regional subdomains: in headers (but not in H1, naturally), titles, page descriptions. You need to specify a city or a specific region of the subdomain.
- The final item price should include shipping to the selected region.
- Create bonus offers and promotions for users from the subdomain region.
Creating a sitemap
For each regional subdomain, you should create a custom sitemap. If you have two or more regional versions of the website, the Sitemap.xml should include them all:
- https://new-york.domain.com/sitemap.xml
- https://boston.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Nowadays, two types of sitemaps are used: sitemap.xml and sitemap.html.
The first is a separate file, which is located at the root of the website. All search engines can read it. The main purpose of sitemap.xml is to show search engines which URLs need to be indexed. Sitemap.html is a static page that contains the URLs leading to the main sections of the website. This map type is intended for visitors, not search engines.
First, you need to confirm the rights to all future subdomains in Google Search Console. For this, open the Google Search Console, select “Add a site” and follow the instructions provided.
XML map
Remember, the sitemap is a list of URLs that must be bypassed by search crawlers to index new pages. After the bypass, the new pages will appear in the search engine results. Each regional subdomain should have its own sitemap.
The sitemap.xml looks like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2019-01-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Each sitemap must have a list of all URLs of the subdomain in use. The map of the main website cannot contain the URLs of regional subdomains.
If XML maps are generated for each new subdomain, you need to inform Google about it.
Open the Google Search Console and select the desired website in the top toolbar. Click on “Sitemap Files». In the box next to your domain, type “sitemap.xml” and select “Send”.
Robots
Each regional subdomain must not only have its own sitemap but also its own robots.txt file.
Robots.txt could look like this (an example you don’t need to use):
User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Adding all subdomain pages to Linkbox and using its Google index checker software would be a good idea. It often happens that the developers have filled the wrong robots on one or more subdomains.
Subdirectories for cities
Having regional subdomains is good but you can’t always implement them. It might be that the budget is too tight or there are technical difficulties. If you can’t implement full-featured subdomains, use regional directories.
We already know that a subdomain is a subdomain of the third (and smaller) level.
A subdirectory is simply a separate folder (directory) located at the root of the website. For example, domain.com/new-york/.
There can be as many regional subdirectories or directories, as well as subdomains, as you want.
Regional subfolders have several advantages:
- preserving the domain age;
- saving all domain metrics, including DA, Page Rank;
- saving the backlinks;
- fast indexing.
The main disadvantage of regional directories is that search engines will not see such a subfolder as separate regional subdomains.
Conclusion
It can be difficult to promote in a certain region. For this, you need to thoroughly prepare your website and create a separate subdomain. There may be one but usually, there are more, especially if you work with several cities at once and are fully present in them.
If your goal is to promote in Google, then it is better to choose the scenario of creating regional directories. Having subfolders for individual regions will keep all the domain metrics gained and keep the website weight in the eyes of search engines.
Subdomains and folders (directories) work both for various cities and countries. If you have an international business, having regional subdomains or subfolders is a great idea.
