Creating a new site for each department of your business. Thoughts?
-
What is everyone's thoughts on creating several websites for your business for each department.
For example.. say you owned a car dealership.
You create a different site for:
- New cars for sale
- Used cars for sale
- Service department -mechanical repairs
- Parts & accessories department
- Financing department
Positives:
Having separate sites for each department would probably make it easier to rank on the specific search terms. Since a whole site on one topic Ie. Used cars would rank over just a page with the same information on a dealership website.
Negatives:
- You would have to maintain 5 sites
- Link building
- Social Media
- Analytics
- ETC.
- Since they are all new domains & sites it will take longer for each site to rank.
- Google will see them as small lower authority sites since they are only a few pages & not larger sites.
What is everyone's thoughts on this? Would you create several small sites? Or would you continue working on one big main authority site & continue link earning to the specific department pages, blogging on the topics etc.
Thanks for any help & opinions!
-
I would not. Just build different sections of the site. An example of this would be an effective online retail store in automotive which has numerous makes/models under one roof. It can be done effectively, you just need to build out a good wireframe.
-
The brand is what I would focus on; opposed to trying to deal with that many sites under a single industry umbrella.
The2 big things in your negatives (Link Building, Social Media) for 5 sites is enough to deter me from thinking any further about it. Then again I'm a tad old school, I would much rather focus on delivering an exciting user experience that users like so much they talk about it. Today that impacts Social Media, before the bird and book, it generated links via forums, emails, and blogs.
My thoughts,
Don
-
It looks like you have laid out all of the positives and negatives very well. You seem to have a good understanding of SEO and of what each plan requires.
A few years ago, the several website model for one business was a widely used SEO tactic, but in my opinion it is not as strong as it used to be. Since exact match domains are not as effective any more and link quality is so important, I would recommend one website.
Also, the search terms you want to show up for are most likely competitve. You can not just build a website with good title tags and header tags and expect to show up. You will need great links for each website.
My advice would be to build one website, but create a separate link building plan for each department. When you build a link for a certain department link to that department's subpage. This will build your domain authority while also giving your website more value because of the deep inbound links.
Also, in my opinion, you will build a stronger brand with one website.
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
-
Site Structure - Is it ok to Keep current flat architecture of existing site pages and use silo structure on two new categories only?
Hi there, I have a site structure flat like this it ranks quite well for its niche site.com/red-apples.html site.com/blue-apples.html The site is branching out into a new but related lines of business is it ok to keep existing site architecture as above while using a silo structure just for the two new different but related business? site.com/meat/red-meat.html site.com/fish/oceant-trout.html Thanks for any advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | servetea0 -
Many New Urls at once
Hi, I have about 5,000 new URLs to publish. For SEO/Google - Should I publish them gradually, or all at once is fine? *By the way - all these URLs were already indexed in the past, but then redirected. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Rankings drop from the new update
Hello, I've noticed some big ranking downs on important keywords, from the last Google update, and don't really know what seams to be the problem, but have an assumption. In April 2015 we had 3.000.000 pages indexed by Google, and 80% of them had duplicated content for about 90% of it. The site I'm talking about is http://nobelcom.com/. The duplicated content came from variations between calling from and calling to selections, because each of this selection was making a new url (ex. nobelcom.com/caling from/calling to). If "calling from" and calling to were the same country the url was nobelcom.com/calling-from, but after you chosen another calling to, the url become like the one in the example. To solve this I've decided to keep the nobelcom.com/calling-from urls and for different calling to country to display the content trough a javascript, because it was the same, it changed only the country names and the rates. I thought that this change will help us with the duplicate content, and still deliver our client what they are interested in, without affecting the UX, and also reducing the link juice dilution because we had 3.000.000 indexed by Google and most of them with no added value Can this be the reason for the drops? Now we have 590.000 pages indexed by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silviu1 -
What happens when I redirect an entire site to an established page on another site?
Hi There, I have a website which is dedicated to selling ONE product (in different forms) or my main brand site. It is branded similarly, targets similar keywords, and gets some traffic which convert to leads. Additionally, the auxiliary site has a Google Rank 2 in its own right. I am thinking of consolidating this "auxillary" site to the specific product page on my main site. The reason I am considering doing this is to give a "boost" to the main product page on our main site which has many core keywords sitting with SERP ranking of between 11-20 (so not in first 10) Because this auxiliary site it gets traffic and leads in its own right, I don't want this to be to the detriment of my leads overall. Question is - if I 301 redirect the entire domain from my auxillary site to the equivalent product on my main site am I likely to see a large "boost" to that product page? (i.e. will I likely see my ranking rise from 11 - 20 significantly)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | love-seo-goodness0 -
301 Redirecting an Entire Site
I have a question which has had me thinking for hours..... If SITE A is ranking well on a number of search phrases and you 301 that site to another (SITE B). The site will change on the Google SERPs to the site which you've re-directed to... In this case SITE B. But how do you maintain the rankings of SITE A?. Do you keep the rankings of SITE A forever? Or will your rankings of SITE A (now SITE B) gradually slip as other sites rank higher? As you can no longer edit SITE A does Google take into consideration the content on SITE B and no longer take anything that SITE A had to offer into consideration? SITE B has simply replaced it in the SERPs??...... Please can anybody help? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | karl620 -
Changing Site URLs
I am working on a new client that hasn't implemented any SEO previously. The site has terrible url nomenclature and I am wondering if it is worth it to try and change it. Will I lose rankings? What is the best url naming structure? Here's the website http://www.formica.com/en/home/TradeLanding.aspx. (I am only working on the North America site.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Can this site be optimised?
I have been told that because of the technology this site was developed with it cannot be changed for example urls title and meta tags cannot be changed. why is that and what other types of sites also cannot be changed. http://www.alliedpickfords.com/Pages/Landing.aspx For example i have been told alot of online stores cannot be optimised because the urls change every time some one goes to the page therefor you cant lionk to a certain page is that true and what is the way around it if any.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | duncan2740 -
How to see which site Google views as a scraper site?
If we have content on our site that is found on another site, what is the best way to know which site Google views as the original source? If you search for a line of the content such as "xyz abc etc" and the other site shows before yours in search results, does that mean that Google views that site as the original source?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0