Consolidate to one robust web property?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
These are awesome, Bryan. Nice work!
-
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.
-
You're very welcome Trent. I'll give you a few more examples you may want to research:
- 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.
- It generally costs more to host and maintain several websites rather than one (something that a lot of people overlook).
- If/When you have a blog (and you should), you'll have one centralized website which will hold its influence and SEO benefits.
- Working with any CMS or back-end development will be much less costly and more efficient.
- If you have reviews or any other customer interaction, they'll hold more worth in one place than spread across several sites.
- You can more accurately use analytics, create goals and objectives, and estimate ROI on your efforts.
-
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.
-
3 points you should make to your bosses:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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
-
Niche sites migration into one authority site
I have multiple websites within the health niche. All 3 sites are about different topics: protein powder, superfoods, and sustainable products. I am thinking about migrating those 3 sites into 1 big site, to establish more authority and for branding purposes. But since those domains are exact match domains, and those exact keywords are pretty high volume, I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Will this be a good idea from a traffic/conversion/seo standpoint? Or should I make a header on top where people can 'switch' between those 3 sites? Or just leave them seperate?
Branding | | mrdjdevil0 -
Need a full web design TEAM.
I'm an SEO manager for a company in Los Angeles. You can see our website here: https://opiates.com. I've been at the company for about 3 months, and in that time we've almost had our website re-done twice. It is badly in need of an overhaul in terms of design and navigation, but at the same time we can't afford to lose the organic traffic that we currently have. Does anyone have recommendations for web development firms that can take on a BIG project and work with me to preserve the SE traffic that we currently have? Thanks
Branding | | Waismann0 -
Is it OK to have two similar business sites share their Social Media (just one FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)?
These two businesses are owned by the same company (industry is event planning). The parent company has been in business 20+ years and caters to a corporate crowd and the more recent company started by the parent caters to consumers (weddings). Would this have any negative seo implications if they share social media accounts? or is this perhaps just more of a strategic issue i gather. And i would gather that its best for each to have their own blog. Would greatly appreciate some insight!Thanks, Christian
Branding | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Responsive web design should I bother? If it isn’t broke don’t fix it?
One of my new businesses is letting holiday cottages and on a few occasions expert web designers have suggested that I should have a redesign because my Dreamweaver website is looking dated and maybe not the best navigation system. The website started off a couple of years ago with one cottage owned by me and I designed the website and I’m certainly not the professional by any means. http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ The only reason I have not invested in a redesign ( although I’m thinking of it once again seriously at the moment ) is because the website has developed into a small letting agency now with eight properties and it’s doing okay with reasonably good search engine listings achieving good occupancy rates on most of the properties. The feedback from people booking cottages is often complimentary regarding how they visualise the properties. I get the feeling this could be because the subject of this website is old world cottages in at old characterful fishing port and possibly the people booking holidays like the personal unpolished website approach, rather than the larger faceless but professionally designed agencies websites, if you get my meaning. In the future of the company grows I can see how will have no choice but have professional template and navigation structure that maybe at this stage it’s just not worth doing? I’ve attached a snapshot of my analytics which shows that when social media like Facebook traffic look at the website there is slightly more people are using mobiles and desktop computers but they seem to stay a similar period of time a look at a similar number of pages so there must be finding site navigation reasonable. What do you think would you go for a redesign at this stage and if so what would be the major advantages? analytics.JPG
Branding | | whitbycottages0 -
Two domains for different countries? or one big domain with folders?
I know this might sound as a newbie question or maybe not, here it goes. I've had a client for the past 2 years, and we have accomplish many good things for his local website .com.ve (venezuela). It's been so good that he is opening a branch in Dominican republic .com.do. The content, strategy and even the services are exactly the same, but the owner wants to have different site for each country. Of course he only wants to pay for one domain. I do want to share our success ont the .com.ve with the other domains and he actually owns the "global" domain .com with his brand name. So, what should I reccomend... Develop a second site and start from scratch? Migrate my blog from the .com.ve site to the .com site and give each country a separate folder? /ve /do?. What it's the best scenario for me to have all the traffic we have earned transfer to the global brand and to have separate info for each country... Thank you so much for your answer that I kno would be great. Dan
Branding | | daniel.alvarez0 -
Sites we can submit web design news to...
Hey Mozzers - happy 2013 to one and all, I hope everyone had a great festive season! Now we're all back into the swing of things, we're in the process of getting our new website up and running. We're a web and graphic design agency, and I'm putting together checklists to ensure we get new projects some coverage where deserved. There will be a different checklist for the different disciplines - brand design, packaging, web design and so on. For many of these disciplines, there are multiple news sites that we can reach out to when we have relevant stories - Dieline for packaging, for example. But for web design, any searches I do either show up CSS Galleries / portfolios (which I already have on the checklist under another section) or web tutorial sites. I don't seem to be able to find decent, trustworthy sites that exclusively feature web news. I'm sure they exist and it's just a case of 'can't see for looking', but does anyone know of decent sites that carry news stories about new websites going live? Obviously we know not every new site will be newsworthy - and indeed we wouldn't try to submit every new site we have go live for that very reason - but it would be good to have a clutch of high authority, well visited sites to turn to when we do have something of note. Any help is much appreciated! Thanks Mozzers!
Branding | | themegroup0 -
One writer, multiple brands - optimizing rel=author across several blogs
Our company has a few different brands, each with their own domain and site. These are not microsites intended to drive traffic to a main site; they all have independent e-commerce functions, full product lines, etc. Imagine we run Plumbing Widgets Inc, Kitchen Remodeling Company, and Springfield Countertops. It's not immediately obvious to surfers that one parent company operates all of these brands, and we're fine with that. Considering that it enables us to own a lot of SERP real estate for some money KWs, we're more than fine with it. We'd like to create a blog for each of these sites/brands. Here's where it gets tricky. After doing some reading, I am persuaded that using rel=author will help us with SERP CTR and possibly rankings themselves. I am going to be writing all of the blog content, at least to start. I don't think I want to rel=author myself on all of these discrete blogs, do I? And surface the fact that one person is the head writer for the blogs of all these brands? Creating blogging pseudonyms doesn't seem like a good idea, since part of the value of rel=author is genuine social engagement, and creating social personas that seem genuine is probably more trouble than it's worth. (Not to mention icky and dishonest.) Should I choose a customer service rep or manager for each brand and use their names and social identities (with their permission, obviously)? It seems like that would involve challenges of its own. I've ghostwritten for one business owner before, but this is on a larger, more complex scale. Any insights are appreciated!
Branding | | CMC-SD0 -
One Page desapeared from Google results over the weekend.
Has anyone had this happen? My page (just one page) is gone from the search results. Not only did we lose our position in Google (we were #9) now the entire page is completely gone from Google index. However, It is on the first page of Bing and Yahoo. We did have our server down from Friday to Monday. I went into Google webmaster tools on Monday and saw a big X next to sitemap. It said HTTP Error 404 detected on August 21, 2011. So Google went in on Sunday and came up with the error. But why only one page is missing and all the other pages still show up? I was thinking that page was blacklisted by Google but when I went to Webmaster Tools to listen to "Requesting reconsideration of your site" video all they talk about is the "site" being blacklisted not a particular page. Any one has any ideas?
Branding | | DmitryP0