Does location of a store make a difference?

Better to be on own domain, subdir, or redirect domain?

[joshdoe]

I'm new to these forums, but am very impressed by the variety and intelligence of the discussions.

My client would like their online store and informational website separated (so that dealers can send their customers to the informational site without fear of pricing issues).

Currently both are on the same domain, with the store under domain.com/store/. My client has been using Overture/Google to advertise the root page (which has links to the store).

For search engine purposes (and advertising purposes), would it be better to promote the domain.com/store/ URI, move the store to a separate domain, or have newdomain.com redirect to the current store URI?

Or is there no difference? Thanks for the advice.

[traffik daddy]

If your using Overture to advertise a specific product then you can deep link it straight to that page. Lets say your advertising and selling a widget at [yourpage.com...] then you can use that direct path in Overture rather than letting the visitor navigate, unless of course that is how your layout is.

I think its better to take the customer straight to what they are looking for rather than letting them find it by navigating your site.

Regards
Terry

[nevetS]

IMO, and I have one because one of my competitors is a national chain in the same boat...

I think having separate pricing on the individual store pages is weak - especially if there are several grouped in an area.

I also think that weeding through a corp. site to get to the local pages is more of a pain than necessary.

I would say that you should set up a corporate site for general info, franchise info, links to locations, etc. and set up either subdomains or separate domains for each location. If you do subdomains, make the prefix easy to remember for return visitors. If they are separate domains, try to make them easy for a user to guess if they want to look at more than one location. (i.e. widgets-nj.com, widgets-ny.com or something like that).

Also... each store site should also have relevant content - not just pricing. A few related articles helps round out the site even if they don't get read very often. If they can't keep up with or create their own content, maybe the corp site can maintain content, with RSS feeds or XML feeds to the store sites.