One domain or two for one company with two lines of business?
-
Let's say you are building a new company that is involved in two lines of business. Let's for example say one line of business is handling logistics for large conventions where the customer(s) are large corporation and the other line is for wedding planning. Let's say that for certain reasons the owner wants to operate under one brand name, say "PROEVENT" So they will market themselves as PROEVENT Convention Logistics and PROEVENT Wedding Planners.
From an SEO perspective, if you have one side of the business doing B-to-B corporate business and the other doing B-to-C do you create two different websites on different domains (proeventconventions.com and proeventweddings.com) with unique design and content, or, do you just use provent.com in order to build better domain authority and on your marketing you use conventions.provent.com that takes you to the convention section of the website and weddings.provent.com takes you to the weddings section?
-
Hi Jazee,
At the end of the day, this ultimately comes down to what you think is best for the company. I do agree with the other answers that building these out as two separate sites could be a better option. And I am going to add on a few more factors that I think you should consider before making this decision. Because the services are so different, you will be able to get target the website (think: backlink outreach) if the website is on one specific topic rather than focusing on multiple services.
However, if these are on one website, you should be able to grow the domain authority more quickly because in theory you could have double the amount of backlinks (link from websites for each service) linking to the one domain.
-
Very good points.
Maybe a more interesting and important question becomes, what are the main decision points (criteria) for when you DO use one domain. For discussion sake, let me throw out a somewhat different hypothetical situation.
Let's say it's a Photography business that focuses on two main types of service. One type is Wedding Photography, the other type is Commercial Real Estate Photography. Again, the similarity with the previous situation is one is a B2C and the other is a B2B. But here I think the type of service is closer between the too so maybe a more difficult decision?
I think maybe the first question you may need to ask is by taking a step back and asking realistically where is your business going to come from? From my own personal experience knowing a lot of people that have gotten married it seems that a very large portion of Wedding Photographers get their business via referrals. Not Google organic search results. In the B2B sector, in many spaces it also holds true that many business relationships are formed via networking/referrals. Back on the Wedding Photography side, I'd venture to say out of the non-word of mouth sources, Yelp might be actually more important than Google. SEO is pretty much irrelevant as far as ranking on Yelp.
SO... I think the first question you have to ask is, do I anticipate a majority of my business will come from people finding me through Google Maps or Google Organic Search results, versus word of mouth and business directories like Yelp. If the answer is NO, the SEO benefit of the single versus multiple website structure becomes less important IMHO.
Let's assume though the majority will come from Google Maps and Organic Results (even though there's also the option of doing Adwords). So what are the next important questions to ask?
1. How different are the two lines of business? (the obvious question which has already been discussed)
2. Will a potential client be less confident about or less impressed with the business if they see the business doesn't specialize in the service being sought? A tough question to answer but I think more likely the answer is yes in the event planning example and possibly NO in the photography example. A good photographer is a good photographer IMHO.
3. How much resources are going to be available to create on an ongoing basis different content on two different websites? Do you have the time to write two different blogs? This may be a more minor consideration though as these types of businesses don't need extremely fresh and rapidly updated blogs.
4. Is the competition for the primary keywords for the two lines of business low, medium, high for the target audience/geography? Maybe this is actually the most important. With separate sites, you can optimize the domain name, title tag, keyword density, etc. for that line of business more so than if you have one site since there is only one root home page. But that may be offset in part or in whole by the diluted domain authority if you do two sites. But if the ranking competition is low, then this isn't as big of a factor in the decision?
Which factor(s) are most important in the decision? Other deciding factors?
-
Absolutely agree with James - the businesses are just too different to be on the same domain. If I were Google looking at a site that offers wedding photography and then logistics, I would wonder which one it is meant to be.
Some businesses can carry this off if they are sufficiently similar, but not in a case such as this.
-Andy
-
Hi Jazee,
I would say that, while there are advantages of having the two lines of business on the same domain (such as having to build domain authority for one website instead of two), from an SEO perspective your optimisation tactics will differ between the two business services.
For example, your link building for the Wedding Planners side of the business will likely require different strategies to Convention Logistics. For this reason, if it were my company, I would keep them on separate domains. There would also be other considerations, such as your content strategy and whether you will have a blog for both, one for each, or no blog at all.
This does depend on factors such as your SEO plans for the businesses, how closely linked the two sides are, how much you can invest in SEO, whether your domains are both starting from scratch (i.e. no domain authority).
In the long run you'll have one website optimised for Wedding Planners and another optimised for Convention Logistics, which in my opinion is better than one website that is split between two different industries.
Hope this helps.
Best regards,
James
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
-
When domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
Duplicate content across domains?
Does anyone have suggestions for managing duplicate product/solution website content across domains? (specifically parent/child company domains) Is it advisable to do this? Will it hurt either domain? Any best practices when going down this path?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pilgrimquality0 -
Keyword Rich Domain
We purchased a keyword rich domain name to use with an existing website. What is the best way to use this domain? Below are some thoughts, I welcome any input. Use this domain as an add-on to the main domain, but only have it load one page off the main domain? Would that cause duplicate content issues? Create a single static page of content for the domain (separate from main domain) Redirect domain to page on master domain, would we loose any benefits of the keyword rich domain? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | idlwebinc0 -
One site two languages - what to do with urls?
Hi, We are working with a client who has a Spanish site which is in English and Spanish, what is the best url structure to go for? www.domain.es and en.domain.es or www.domain.es and www.domain.es/en or none of the above?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Domain Mapping, WordPress MultiSite
Hello, With WordPress MultiSite, does Domain Mapping negatively impact search rankings? I am wondering if the search engines can tell if the Domain is part of a MultiSite Network. Or does it just see the site as a regular website? I understand the issue of IP Address and C Blocks but I'm wondering if the search engines will treat a Mapped Domain Name as it would any other website that is on a shared hosting account. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
We are moving one website to a different domain and would like to know what is the best way to do it without hurting SEO
The website we want to move, let's say www.olddomain.com has a low quality back links profile, in fact it received a manual notification from google of unnatural links detected; but the home page has a PR 3. We want to move it to a different domain let's say www.newdomain.com. We would like to know if it's better to do a 301 redirect to the new domain, in order to transfer the link juice or if it would be better to do a 302, taking into account that this redirect won't pass any link juice, so it would be like start from scratch with this new domain. Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Merging two websites to one...
Hi all. Could do with a second opinion on this please... At present a client of ours owns two shops (both doing the same but in towns about 20 miles apart - they sell flooring, but using different names) and has a website for each. The plan is to rebrand both of these stores the same and merge both websites into one. The problem comes that both of the individual websites rank very well in their respective Google Local search results and I fear that killing one of the sites will mean that one store will vanish from the local listings. One domain is a DA 45 and the other a DA 11 so the plan is to use the stronger of the two domains. The question I would like to ponder with people wiser than myself is how can we ensure that the new single domain ranks for both locations in the local? Would the easiest solution be to have pages such as domain.com/store1 and domain.com/store2 with full listings for that store inc name, address, phone number, customer reviews etc? At present the DA 45 domain ranks very well in it's Google local so we need to find a way to change the homepage of that to have both the stores phone numbers but without affecting the local listing. I was considering adding the second phone number as a text based image so that it's visible for people but not for bots Finally, would 301 redirecting the now unused store to domain.com/store2 help with ensuring that we do not lose any local listing for that keyword? If not, are there any suggestions people could offer up Many thanks for any help and sorry for the very long question Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
SERP Drop overnight for one of our domains - could it be the title changes?
Hi Scratching our heads here over SERP drop for some of our product pages, Although they are all uniquely titled with the product name, we have recently added 4 words at the end of our title, like a slogan which are repeated on every one of our product pages. However, we've also seen a drop, but not as far, on related category pages, these have unique titles. When we talk about "unique title" being important for SEO, does that mean 0 reptition between page titles? I see many companies use their site name in the title (even here see | SEOMOZ Q&A - would four words at the end of a title do this? Or am i barking up the wrong tree entirely? Ive seen so much movement over the past few weeks its hard to correlate anything we do with the result, so even after advise I think i'll wait a week
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0