If you are promoting a website in CIS countries and Yandex is the primary search engine, it makes sense to focus on linking your website to the regions where you want to achieve strong visibility. How can you do this?
Yandex
- Subdomains. You can associate your website with a specific region by using subdomains. Create a separate subdomain for each city or region—for example, kazan.site.ru, rostov.site.ru, and so on. Fill them with content, write unique meta tags containing the city name, and add regional details to the category descriptions, including the city, regional code, delivery addresses, metro stations, street names, separate phone numbers, and other relevant information.
You should use every relevant detail that can associate the website with the target region. A subdomain can be linked to a region even without an offline branch by providing an address. You can then open Yandex Webmaster and assign the corresponding region to each subdomain.
- Yandex Business Directory. Add your company to the Yandex Business Directory and specify the required addresses for your regional branches. However, you will need to verify these addresses, as Yandex may eventually send a representative to inspect them. You will also need valid phone numbers that redirect users to the primary number. Yandex may request photographs of the office and other proof.
The difference is that subdomains allow you to include the city name in the meta tags. When using the Yandex Business Directory to associate the main website with several regions, listing every city in the Title tag would be inappropriate.
- Google My Business. Associating a website with specific cities is more complicated in Google. Google Search Console does not allow you to assign multiple regions to a website—you can only specify a country. Regional targeting is handled through Google My Business, where you create a business profile and provide its address. Google sends a verification code to confirm that the company exists at that address. This creates a limited regional association that works less effectively than Yandex’s system.
- Subdirectories. Another way to promote one website in several regions on Google is to create a separate subdirectory for each city. You cannot directly associate these pages with specific regions. However, by optimizing their meta tags and content and improving their CTR in search results, you can achieve better regional rankings than competitors who do not use this method. The structure might look like this: site.ru/odessa/category/ or site.ru/kharkiv/category/, with all relevant website content placed inside the corresponding folder.
Which option should you choose: subdomains, subdirectories, or promotion of the main website? The decision should be based on your competitors and the search results for the target query. For example, if you search Google from Kazan for “buy a hookah” and subdomains such as kazan.kalyany.ru appear at the top, this strategy is working. The screenshot shows the search results for “buy a hookah” in Sumy, Ukraine. Two of the top-ranking websites use subdomains.
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