Legal Marketing & PR

Do You Need a New Domain for a New Legal Market?

By Peter

So your firm decided to enter a new market.  You were in Dallas and now you are expanding to Houston.  Do you need to get a new domain?  Perhaps. If your strategy has been to use search friendly domains from the outset, like – www.dallasdivorcelawyer.com, then you may want to pick up the Houston version.

Here are the nitty gritty details to decide.

1. Get a New Overall Domain ? You can purchase an overall domain that would be for both cities (current and new).  You would 301 redirect any previous domains.  This would be the dominant domain for all sites and all sites would redirect into this domain.
   Pros – Good for branding and SEO (with proper 301).
   Cons – Need to advertise / market change of domain.
2. Additional Web Site for the New Market ? For search optimization purposes, I would recommend creating new sites, with unique content for each market.  While this increases the costs as we need to develop other niche sites, it is effective for branding and search optimization.
   Pros – Great as you don’t have to change anything on current site.  You get a new site to brand too!
   Cons – Costs
3. Redirect New Domain ? If branding is the only consideration, then we can simply redirect the domain to the existing site.  We can do this with a 301 redirect so that the main dominant domain is shown on the web site launch (best for SEO), or we can alias the domain so that it remains as whatever the user types in (not recommended for SEO reasons).
   Pros -  Easy to do.
   Cons – If you do not 301, then it could lead to SEO issues.  If you do the 301, then it could lead to some small branding issues.

So how has your firm treated expansion?  Let us know by chiming in below.

Full post as published by PaperStreet Web Design: SpeakOut on September 22, 2009 (boomark / email).