Current Best Practice: Local B&M retailer + EComm Website "Sharing"
It's been a few years since I worked on an eCommerce business that also has a LOCAL B&M presence, so I'd like to see where the current thinking in terms of best practices is in terms of how to set-up/structure the web presence.
The ecomm platform will most likely be Shopify. I'd like to keep it all on Shopify, but if we need to have stronger content management for blogs, etc. maybe also have WP integrated somehow, or maybe as a subdomain.
In my experience for small retailers like this, Geolocation is not really a good option to serve up differing content blocks. But maybe there's new magic available now.
My initial "gut" approach would be to have:
1) www.site.com be the e-comm focused site with some kind of call to action for local visitors to click a link that will lead them to the locally focused content (or maybe rely on a geoloc solution to help make this more transparent from a UX perspective)
2) Locally oriented site would be a sub-domain like local.site.com or maybe just a sub-directory www.site.com/local
My concerns revolve mostly about SEO considerations. I'm not sure where things stand with google treating sub-domains as different sites, thus splitting SEO-juice, as well as the logistics and technical issues with Shopify handling sub-domains but essentially pointing to the "same" site...
So, I'd love to hear some ideas or battle-tested approaches to how to optimize SEO & UX for a site that needs to serve local customers as well as non-local Ecomm.
Thanks in advance for the insight!
The ecomm platform will most likely be Shopify. I'd like to keep it all on Shopify, but if we need to have stronger content management for blogs, etc. maybe also have WP integrated somehow, or maybe as a subdomain.
- I'd prefer to not have to design and run two sites
- I'm mostly concerned with: 1) "Global" SEO for the eCommerce site & "Local" SEO for the more "marketing" related functions of the site stepping on each other
- One of the big concerns or issues is how to handle the need to publicize local events and promotions with
In my experience for small retailers like this, Geolocation is not really a good option to serve up differing content blocks. But maybe there's new magic available now.
My initial "gut" approach would be to have:
1) www.site.com be the e-comm focused site with some kind of call to action for local visitors to click a link that will lead them to the locally focused content (or maybe rely on a geoloc solution to help make this more transparent from a UX perspective)
2) Locally oriented site would be a sub-domain like local.site.com or maybe just a sub-directory www.site.com/local
My concerns revolve mostly about SEO considerations. I'm not sure where things stand with google treating sub-domains as different sites, thus splitting SEO-juice, as well as the logistics and technical issues with Shopify handling sub-domains but essentially pointing to the "same" site...
So, I'd love to hear some ideas or battle-tested approaches to how to optimize SEO & UX for a site that needs to serve local customers as well as non-local Ecomm.
Thanks in advance for the insight!