Managing Subsidiaries. Should I house them all in a single domain? What about a single social media presence?

[MeasureEverything]

Situation: My company has 8 subsidiaries. They each have their own niche (IT, Electrical, Roofing, etc...). We also have offices in multiple countries (If that's even a factor).

Questions:

1. Should I establish a web presence for each one? (www.SubsidiaryOne.com)  I would then link to these sites from www.ParentCompany.com. The other options are to do something like www.ParentCompany.com/SubsidiaryOne or SubsidiaryOne.ParentCompany.com. We are trying to build the brand of the parent company so I figured that housing everything inside of the parent company domain would help me meet my goal. Each company will have its own unique content, products, blogs, etc...

2. Should each subsidiary have its own social media presence (Its own Google+, Twitter, FB, etc...) or should I house them all under the umbrella of the parent?

Thanks, Alex

[MeasureEverything]

Alan,

I agree with you and Ash. Providing we are willing to commit the proper resources to support separate efforts like this, I think that the ccTLD is the way to go.

-Alex

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'm with Ash on the Internationalization strategy. I would also suggest that if you go with domain.com/countryspecificsection/ then each country specific section should have it's on country / language specific structured markup and Meta data assignment. This will help ensure Google doesn't have to figure it out on their own (because they are a gambler's nightmare as to how they can get mixed signals wrong).

[trainSEM]

My preference is for the ccTLD if there will be a commitment to optimise that domain - usually the smaller countries are sales offices without a proper marketing complement, so they assume that "head office" will look after the website. Head Office usually doesn't have any budget to cater to the subsidiaries, so the ccTLD will be left to its fate.

Hence your choice of company.com/Country will do.

While Bing is not too important, note that its Webmaster tools has an option to mark off such country folders as being different countries. My suspicion is that Google automatically picks up such cues.

[MeasureEverything]

Ash,

Your response was very informative. Thank you. It looks like you've got a nice amount of international experience. That's great! If the branded TLD in each country is available, should I stick with that vs. Company.com/Country?

-Alex

[MeasureEverything]

Drew,

Your logic is sound. I will keep this in mind. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew but the company is willing to give me the proper resources to ensure that each individual brand is given the proper attention. At this point it's really going to come down to me asking them if each brand is THAT important. I agree that it would be more resource/time/cost effective to manage one vs. many.

Thanks Drew!

-Alex

[MeasureEverything]

Alan,

Thank you very much for your response. I will not be linking from every page. I will ensure that those links are housed in the "About" or "Contact" sections as recommended. I would like each entity to operate as its own brand. Each entity is responsible for their own production & marketing efforts so it would be good for them to be totally separate.

I plan on approaching each website as its own. I will not throw up a few pages and expect results. There needs to be an ongoing effort for each entity.

Thanks again Alan.

-Alex

[trainSEM]

Being in Australia I tend to get a good share of multi-national SEO challenges.

Larger, established brands can break all the rules concerning TLDs because they get local authority through their local links and citations. A current client is a major bank with a presence in 31 countries. They just happen to be my bank, so I have observed them over 20 years. They started as a .com with an Australian emphasis and were multi-national for a while. Then they shut down some of the foreign offices. They then decided to populate their .com.au domain and left a complete, parallel copy on the original .com. Then they resumed their global focus and did NOT use their TLDs in those countries because a handful were not in their possession. These are the obscure countries that haven't signed up to the international copyright conventions. Branding is paramount for them, so no amount of SEO advice could budge them.

So their international locations take the format example.com/countryname. Does that work for them? Of course it does. I was in Singapore where I tested for myself from a local PC, so as to remove any hint of my personal history. They do very well. Despite having the duplicate content in Australia, they do very well among their peers.

A former client who has offices in over 60 countries also started as a .com and when they got more serious in the US they realised that they did not rank at all in that country. They had the usual IT-centric excuse not to make many sites, so I left that for them to resolve internally. Is sales more important than some technician's convenience? I hope they got that point. I did recommend a local micro site for the US that would display US-centric customer stories and local news events.

The takeaways here are that local content and local links can overcome any advantages/disadvantages of a gTLD for a multi-national site.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Drew,

Thanks for emphasizing the resource allocation consideration. I mentioned it only in a minor way, yet it really is a critical consideration.

[drewschug]

The real question is, do you have the time, energy and resources to manage more than one website / social media / seo campaign really well? Having worked with companies who tried that approach, it seemed like they split there attention and none of them really panned out. The ones that got the focus did well. I'm not saying you should not do the subsidiaries, but perhaps that can come later, if one area grows beyond what the site can do from a content standpoint, or needs more SEO attention. As Alan mentioned it's about the brand, and in my experience, managing one brand vs eight is more resource/time/cost effective.

[AlanBleiweiss]

The founding principle to SEO is brand identification. The more you do to model your web presence after successful major brands, the more you will naturally earn trust and authority big brands earn. That in turn boosts all other aspects of SEO.

To achieve this specific to subsidiaries, you establish a parent company corporate site, and a stand-alone domain for each subsidiary.  Every site however, needs to utilize the most sustainable SEO methods possible. You can't just slap up sites with a few pages and expect them to rank or pull in highly qualified visitors without serious focus.

Only link back to the parent company site and other subsidiary sites from your "About", and "Contact" sections unless you believe it's valuable from a visibility perspective to link from every page. HOWEVER if you link from every page, they should be nofollow links. if you do mass volume links from site to site and they're not nofollowed, that leaves you highly exposed to potential algorithm penalties.

If you want each subsidiary to succeed as its own brand you will need separate social channels for each as well.  Again though, they'll only be helpful long-term if you have the resources to maintain them in quality engagement ways.

There are many other rules and guidelines (like "keep duplication of content to as near zero as possible") however that's the core concept that addresses your question here.