One Site vs. Many

[unikey]

This is a question that I am not sure has a "right" answer. I am just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on this. I can see benefit of both sides of the coin.

In your opinion, is it better to have one large e-commerce site with all of your content on the same domain or is it better to have multiple more targeted domains with your content broken up into smaller chunks?

The reason I ask is, I feel like while multiple more targeted sites certainly have the benefit of focus, aren't you taking all your traffic and content, splitting it up and leaving you with several sites that most likely are getting less traffic than one large site would.

All opinions welcome.

[irvingw]

Sure, you can absolutely create brand pages and from there branch to product pages. A bigger site is more effective and easier to maintain and promote and analyze than multiple small sites.

[unikey]

Ok, we are a vitamin and supplement company.. so all of our products fit within that scope. We have a couple of additional sites for more in depth weight loss programs (our best selling products) that we sell the supporting supplements for on our main site. These additional sites are branded for those programs and have lots of supporting content blogs, recipes, etc.

I suppose we could create some heavily branded areas in our main site specific to those products and build all of that out further.  We are in a highly competitive market so any ground we can gain is helpful. Also, we are a smaller company in comparison to many of our competitors, so my fear is that splitting all of our content into these different sites could put us at a disadvantage.

Thanks for the advice so far, still not sure what route to take... but appreciate you taking the time to respond.

[irvingw]

One site if all somewhat related, several sites if completely different. You don't want shoes, car parts and landscaping on one site. You do want car parts, van parts and motorcycle parts on one site. The single site will be stronger than several smaller stand alone sites.

[David-Kley]

One Site To Rule Them All

*sorry, I had too, lol

[DJ123]

That makes sense. In that case, I would analyze the competition level for your "money" keywords and topics and see if it makes sense to split them up.  You would also need to think about if there is enough content to write about,  and constantly feed for the highly localized kind of site.

It has been my experience that an entire site whose content is wholly focused on one topic will rank better generally speaking than a larger site with a broader base of topics (for that keyword and topic).  This is good and bad because you will only be able to use the 1 site for about 1 topic.

The competition level will play a large factor in the decision IMO.  That would be the next thing I would look at.

[unikey]

Thanks for the response.

Well, from an administration perspective, we have multiple sites already... so I certainly know the challenges and amount of time that can take. I personally am leaning toward having only one site, but am looking for some reasons why one strategy may be better than the other. I was wondering more from an SEO perspective since the administrative complexity would only be simplified with one site.

I also agree, any answers I get will probably be sweeping generalizations without knowing all the specifics of our business, and analytics.. so I am taking that into account.

[DJ123]

IMO, one site is enough to manage all by itself.

Having multiple sites, just from an administration perspective is very challenging in particular when you go over a certain amount.  You would have to have full time admins just to manage the sites, let alone the content of each site.

You would have to add up how much expense you have per unit of site versus how much net revenue (profit) you have directly from that site.  I think in a lot of cases the expenses per site are going to exceed the profits, but before making a sweeping generalization, do a study and make your best guesses before investing in the infrastructure, IT and employees.