Consolidate to one robust web property?

[reusabletranspack]

I am new at my company. I was brought on to generate more leads via their websites. Although, they aren't letting me do what I think is best. So I need help convincing them. Can you please help me prove them wrong?

We are an online reseller/distributor. We sell our products under one brand. We sell a wide variety of widgets that are manufactured by several different companies. We have 9 unique web properties and 50 landing pages. Each website and landing page is on a unique domain, design, and purpose.

I would like to consolidate everything to one robust, e-commerce website that will reside on our primary domain.

My bosses are convinced that more websites are better because it will prevent our competitors from ranking above us. We can "block" them from ranking on all the main keywords. They are also convinced that domain name plays a major role in SEO. But I've got that part covered

What do you think?

[reusabletranspack]

Thank you for the reply. Great ideas! I am building a big case to present soon. This isn't going to be easy, but i've got some fight in me.

[ClaytonJ]

Trent

A bit esoteric but anyway, see below...  my experience is from what you say the people you are talking to do not really understand digital so you need to strip it back to an analogy and $$'s.  Do not talk digital... waste of time.

We have a government client had 125 websites to service one city! ....   we have them down to 25 - it is slow going.  We could do with one website.   The only analogy that worked was as below as it related to costs.

Think of your website as the house you live in.  The cost of owning 10 houses for your family is 10 x 1 house. Every bit of work is amplified x 10 - 10 websites as it is for houses.  Even have to travel between the houses and use different tools. 10 x backlinks, 10 x website audits, 10 x blogs etc etc.  A pain in the butt. So each time the client asked for something we quoted and then multiplied times it by 125 - they soon got the $$ picture.

We explained to them it is cheaper to have different rooms in a big house, than it is to have a alot of small houses.  Same as a website. ie a room with an African theme - is cheaper than building a site dedicated to Africa. Tell them they need one big house, and you will make them some great rooms and it will cost less and be more effective.

Plus the biggest benefit - you own the biggest & best house on the street rather than 10 small houses all in some state of disrepair as resources are spread to thin.  Google like to rank the biggest house on the street, no 1.

[EGOL]

These are awesome, Bryan.  Nice work!

[EGOL]

If I owned this company we would stop selling our products from hotdog stands and build a real store.

If you combine all of these websites into a single nice store the power that occurs when they pull together will be like uniting the clans.  Also, a greater diversity of merchandise on a single site results in great selection, greater customer satisfaction and larger shopping carts at checkout.   If your bosses don't understand the incredible value of that then they must have flunked their accounting class.

I don't know what kind of domains you are currently selling from.  If you are selling coffee makers on CoffeeMakers.com then I might be hesitant to give it up, because domains like that are awesome.  However if you are selling from domains like bestdamncoffeemakers.biz then I would close those outhouses and build a real store.

[Lumina]

You're very welcome Trent. I'll give you a few more examples you may want to research:

1. Having a higher number of product pages creates a more robust e-commerce experience, while also ensuring customers can find **related products **where they otherwise wouldn't.
2. It generally costs more to host and maintain several websites rather than one (something that a lot of people overlook).
3. If/When you have a blog (and you should), you'll have one centralized website which will hold its influence and SEO benefits.
4. Working with any CMS or back-end development will be much less costly and more efficient.
5. If you have reviews or any other customer interaction, they'll hold more worth in one place than spread across several sites.
6. You can more accurately use analytics, create goals and objectives, and estimate ROI on your efforts.

[reusabletranspack]

THANK YOU for your feedback!

I am building a large case to present to them soon. I have done a lot of research. If you are willing, please list those other reasons. I'll take short descriptions and research them myself.

[Lumina]

3 points you should make to your bosses:

1. There's no such thing as "blocking" another site in that way - and in fact, you're **only blocking your own sites **this way. You're competing with yourself, which is silly to do.
2. The more rich, unique, and well-rounded content you have on a website, the better it'll do. These should absolutely be consolidated into one website. Think of it this way: instead of using 9 smaller sites that are getting 11% of your effort each, making one site that gets 100%, and will absolutely do better in SERPs, is the way to go.
3. You're much more likely to make mistakes, have errors, and duplicate content if everything's across different websites instead of one. That's a huge potential issue.

I can think of dozens of other reasons you should centralize everything into one site, but these are probably the biggest ones.