Multiple Sites Vs. Single Site
-
We're a growing law firm looking into expanding into different practices of law. The question we're running into is should we create new sites for our different practice areas or add them to our current site?
If we create multiple sites we have to divide our linking building efforts, but if we maintain everything under a single domain will be harder to be considered an "expert" on each section of law and get ranked well in each category?
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
-
Thank you for the fantastic advice gentlemen!
-
Lawrence, it won't be harder to show you're an expert with a single domain vs. two domains. Remember, it's not to Google that you have to show your expertise, it's to your audience. Google recognizes that your audience sees you as an expert when they share, comment and link to your content. Now, wrangle all them lawyers up and keep 'em all on one domain--and tell them to invest in good writers, it'll be worth it.
-
Let me start out by saying the answer below is PERSONAL PREFERENCE:
I would keep everything in one site and separate by menu items and sub menu items. I assume that the content won't change as much unless the law changes. This will make your seo pushes more efficient and make your domain more of an authority as well as the potential to have several niche categories connect to you (contextual).
However, this would be a long term strategy that would not yield immediate results, so you have to question whether or not you need immediate results/is your website currently bring business, or are you willing to wait for the website to start converting.
I hope that helps somewhat with the decision making process.
-
You are correct in saying that you would have to divide your link building efforts if you have multiple sites. If you use subdomains, you would get some of the value of linking across all of your sites; however, I don't think that would be good necessarily for your example.
I would suggest that you have landing pages specific to each category of law, then subpages under each landing page that are pertinent to that specific category.
For instance, you could have a Family Law page, which would then have subpages of Divorce, Child Custody, Child Support, Adoption, etc. You could still very well rank well for each of your categories and subcategories.
I would think that your clients would think you were experts in each of your category pages, but I am not too familiar with lawyering
Hope this helps.
Mike
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Links Removed from Site but not Google Webmaster Tools
I have a new client who has been fighting to get past an unnatural links penalty. One of the biggest reasons behind it was that they paid to get a followed link/ad on a blog network, well this ad ended up being a site wide link which ended up giving them thousands of back links within a few days. After getting the owner of the blog network to remove the link i manually spot checked a handful of pages and used screaming frog to crawl looking for a link referencing their site. From what i can tell they are all gone. However they are still in Google Webmaster Tools as well as Google's index and it has been a couple months since they have been removed. Does anyone have any advice on getting them removed from Google's entities even though they are already off of the website? Thank you in advance,
Link Building | | kchandler
Kyle0 -
What are the best guest blog sites around?
Im not talking outreach software or anything like that but more along the same lines of myblogguest. Id like to know which ones you have actually used and your opinion, there are tons of them out there but most are spammy cr+p
Link Building | | therealmarkhall0 -
Pagerank 0 vs Page Authority 53....?
I sometimes see sites with PageRank 0 but Page Authority 50+. For instance http://auto.beginthier.nl/: PageAuthority = 53
Link Building | | PrizeWize
mozRank = 4,64
mozTrust = 5,69
Root domain links = 42
PageRank = 0 How should i interpret these stats? If or instance i'm optimizing for a car related website (a site about: car parts, car insurrance, classic cars), would these be a good place or a bad place to get links from (ignoring the benefits of direct traffic)? PA = 53 (very good) Vs. PR = 0 (very bad)?0 -
A tool to post to all bookmarking sites
Hi, does anyone know if there is a tool that you can use from your desktop to post to all bookmarking sites at once. Ping fm was really good but now it has changed and not as good. So now i am looking for a good online tool where i can post to all of my bookmarking sites to help increase visitors to our site. It seems a lot of the good tools are going which includes Posterous any help would be great
Link Building | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Press Release Sites
Do Press Releases sites still worth to engage in terms of link building and domain authority building? I heard they don't deliver link authority anymore? If they they still do, Which top 10 free and paid site would you recommend? What is the up-to-date link building method would you recommend? Thank you very much!
Link Building | | DigitalJungle1 -
Run of Site Links
I recently got a link from a relevant site but it ended up being a run of site link. The site has over 3,000 pages that now link to my site. Will my site get penalized for this?
Link Building | | mj7750 -
So I ran into a site that was not ranking 4 days ago and has over 2 million links to it on some keywords. My guess is this is a link bomb, but the issue is this is pushing one of my sites down. Does anyone know a good way to over come a bomb like this?
So I ran http://www.riogrande.com/ into this site not that long ago and wanted to see if any other SEO's have an opinion on it. I've seen a Google bomb before, but the amount of links going into this URL is insane. The thing is how does one over come a Google Bomb? Do you just wait to see what Google does or do you just hope to rank under that URL? I should also note that it appears that all the keywords to it are relevant to the sites content. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks
Link Building | | kateG12980 -
Multiple same domain links on Open Site Explorer
In doing competitor link analysis on Open Site Explorer, I've noticed quite a few links coming from the same domain listed separately. This seems to be especially prevalent with Google directory listings. For example, I'll see a link to the site from google.hu/...., google.am/..., google.kz/..., etc. In some cases, it will be prefixed with an IP address, followed by the subfolder address. Correct me if I am wrong, but these seem to be all counting as separate root domains that are linking to the site. How is this done? Are directory submissions given to each country's google directory? Does an original DMoz listing get re-submitted to all of these? Just looking for some clarification on this and how it's accomplished. Thanks everyone!
Link Building | | NiallTom0