Chris Stone
Traffic gridlocks in the New York City are rising exponentially. It has come down to the Department of Transportation having to roll out a Gridlock alert each year to ease out travelers who are on their way to work, for shopping, or any other leisure activity. The gridlock alerts are normally rolled out for the busiest days of the year, mostly in the midst of the holiday festivities, however this doesn’t mean that traffic in New York remains calm and smooth flowing on other days. Even on uneventful days, the general public has to deal with this situation on a daily basis however they may resent it, and unfortunately, not a lot can be done to eradicate or at least remedy the situation.
A probable solution may include recruiting more officials to help in normalizing the flow of traffic and ease the public suffering, to an extent. The officials are still picking their brains on offering the most viable solution to this dilemma.
The business setting in New York pretty much dances to the same tunes. Businesses operating in the online space are usually the ones most effected, and have to contend with facing a host of similar gridlocks when the online traffic ceases flowing to and fro from their website. Not only do these gridlocks hamper the business development process, they also deter other interested members from landing on the website and completing a transaction. So the online marketers at Branex gathered around and put two and two together to find out what can be done to resolve this concern.
What they did find out is that every business owner is working along the same lines, including attaining growth, revenue, more onsite visitors, and eventually boosting online conversions. Ideally, the situation appears highly lucrative and simple enough to achieve, however when one talks about international markets specifically for online businesses, it comes down to the search engine optimization efforts to bring in the most pain.
Expansion in terms of SEO efforts is the most painstaking element that you will ever have to contend with. How you plan on expanding and considering the vehicles to monetize the results, greatly depends on your planning skills. URL structure, to start with, is a process for setting up a unique identity on the search engines and is irreversible in most cases. Normally what a business owner does is to set up a URL structure and the search engine optimizer leverages that structure to start casting their spell. However, when your business starts catering to more than one geographical location, things start to get rather nasty.
In case of expansion that covers multiple locations under a single umbrella, there is often a conflicting representation on what should be done. Businesses need to be proactive and determine a route for them that could work as displacement, minimizing the risks and costs attached therein. When opting in to expand across multiple locations, an important consideration lies in determining the perceived linguistic and cultural barriers and most importantly, coming up with a way of content delivery that really counts and persuades the native audience to take action. All such stuff cannot be clubbed into one single web page. To effectively address the issue, we bring forward the existence of subdirectories or regional pages for businesses that wish to operate in more than one global locations. Let’s see how subdirectories can really help businesses in bagging an optimal performance in each of the regions they are operating in:
Prominent reasons to use subdirectories
It goes without saying that subdirectories can help businesses, looking to operate across multiple geographical locations, show up in the regional search results. This can best be envisaged with an example of a professional website design agency that operates across Canada, Turkey, and Dubai. So the hypothetical regional URLs for such an agency would include:
A counter-argument might pop up here that the agency could have invested efforts in creating URLs with the regional TLD (top level domain), but the use of multiple TLDs such as .com, .ae, .co or .ca can result in a differentiated SEO strategy for each URL, which might even result in a number of varied outcomes. Using subdirectories makes the work a whole lot easier for the search engine optimizers and bring positive results to the front in lesser time. A search engine optimizer then works on each of the subdomains and targets them fully to achieve results among regionally searched keywords, such as the “best website design agency in the United States”, or “ the best website design agency in Canada” etc.
Franchises
Businesses using franchises as part of vamping up their regional presence, can offer subdirectories to the franchise so that they can optimize their content marketing efforts in the region through the extension of the original domain. This also adds value and credibility to the overall business by not refracting its brand identity through multiple domains.
Multiple, separate product lines
Subdirectories can also be used to create separate product pages. With the help of subdirectories, a business has a better chance of building customer focus around a niche product line. The main reason behind doing so is to amplify the performance of product pages on search engines. So for each product of a utensil company, it can have a separate subdirectory for silverware, cookware, and crockery, with focused search engine strategies applied for achieving targeted results.
Some benefits of using subdirectories
Some of the most prominent and cost-saving benefits that the use of subdirectories can bring to the table for a business owner include:
- One hosting fee for all your pages, including any additions that you keep adding to the main domain.
- One content management system that lets you manage all the pages from one central location.
- A subdirectory also allows you to insert targeted keywords in your URL structure, making them self-explanatory right from the first glance.
- Sometimes, the main website gets cluttered with information and becomes difficult to manage. With a subdirectory, business owners can create a smooth user experience for the web visitors. This not only creates a great user experience but also allows businesses to build their authority in the niche markets. The authority that is built around the subdirectory pages further enforces the overall authority of the business, making it more prone to success.
However, you will then be entitled to manage all the pages yourself, so that will come as an extra task to you when you might already be overwhelmed with your daily to-do list. Also, another difficulty that you might face in creating the subdirectories of your main domain is the creation of content. Since the idea behind using subdirectories is to make separate entries for each of your product lines, therefore every page should have unique, informative and up to date content that can align your business strategy with your goals. Also, note that the website content is something that needs tweaking every now and then and may as well require a complete revamp if a need arises.
Conclusion
The use of subdirectories is a sole business decision that portrays the overall vision of the business leaders. It has also be seen that some business owners just don’t go with the idea of creating subdirectories, even when they promise better results in terms of search engine optimization and efficacy in lead generation. Sometimes, the business owner is just overwhelmed with tasks that are already crowding their plate, to spare a free minutes to look away. A viable option in such a situations is to contact a digital agency in New York that can provide you with targeted answers to your questions pertaining to the use and benefits of subdirectories for your product pages.
Joe Clark
Mohammad Ali
Ashad Rehman