One Domain or Four?

[Revolution_Inc]

Hi,

We are coming to a bit of a crossroads at our company. Our current website www.revolutioninc.co.uk is ranking half decently in some of our main keywords and is moving in the correct direction. However.

There is talk of us now producing a different website for each of our services Web Design, Graphic Design, Marketing and Print. I think I see the benefits of doing 4 seperately in terms of bounce rate probably improving, being able to produce a more concentrated amount of content per site, etc.

We have a meeting on it tomorrow and I do have a good few key points to discuss regarding the advantages. Initially however, does anybody here have an opinion of the potential pitfalls/benefits of following this route. I'm thinking also in regards to the direction google is heading.

Any opinion is appreciated, good or bad, as I want to put as informed decision as possible across.

[jpgprinting]

If you are able to buy all those domains do it! and keep it from you competition, if you already got then, that was a smart move!

[wojkwasi]

Keep all the love in one spot.. also, will lower maintenance costs

[Revolution_Inc]

Thanks for all the response guys, it's been really helpful.

It looks like I will be heading into this meeting with a much more informed decision.

[attorney]

I went through a great deal of stress thinking about the same thing as you - I have several great domains that complement my main domain very well. Considering that they are industry terms, they would bolster what I do even more. I went through every possible analysis and came to this conclusion and hope it helps you out.

**1) If it's about your brand, then it's about your brand. **

Sounds simple and stupid but it's true. Taking each domain separately is nice but people were always most impressed with the main one. And at the end of the day, when they wanted to easily find everything, they expected it to be on my main domain. They expected to interact with me at my primary domain. They did not expect to take out accounts on three web sites and write to me at three email addresses.

2) Domain authority issue with SEO. This has already been mentioned so I won't expound except to say less is less and dividing what you have elsewhere makes you a small fish in a smaller niche rather than a larger fish in a bigger sea.

3) Managing 1 site is much easier than integrating 4. Subdomains are a pain to manage more than subdirectories. It only gets more challenging when you're moving to completely separate domains, may want to deal with one single database for all, firewalls, etc. It's yet another hassle you may not need or want to deal with.

So what am I doing? I'm going to set up little silo sites on each of those domains and primarily use them as doorways into my primary domain. They will have RSS feeds from our main sites, some other rss feeds from some other locations and might actually attract some unique content there as well. Nice to have but my primary focus is on my main domain.

And after reading dozens of posts on this issue, I'm very glad to have made a decision and moving in that direction. If I ever want to move my content to those domains, I'll do just that when the time comes. Best of luck to you.

[ebenthurston]

Benefits of four separate domains:

If you own domains with your keywords in them, then the keyword relevancy would be a reason to go in that direction.

For example:

• WebDesign.com
• GraphicDesign.com
• Marketing.com
• Print.com

Assuming those aren't the domains in question, and they're more like revolutionincwebdesign.com, then the keyword relevancy won't be much of a benefit.

Pitfalls of four separate domains:

As Gareth and Brina said, you'll be splitting your domain authority and you'll need to quadruple your link building efforts just to stay even.

Bottom line, unless these are killer domains, or you're a holding company with different and unrelated business, it's most likely better to focus on building up a single domain.

You can always use the keywords in the filename:

• www.revolutioninc.co.uk/web-design
• www.revolutioninc.co.uk/graphic-design
• www.revolutioninc.co.uk/marketing
• www.revolutioninc.co.uk/print

[SarahGoliger]

It wouldn't help your domain authority - It would hurt it quite a lot. That's because all of your work is going to be split up, and none of your domains will share in each other's success. You will have to do four times the work to build your domain authority. I would strongly recommend against doing this.

Having that many domains is just setting yourselves up for confused customers (who get onto one domain for your business but can't find what they were looking for), CMS headaches as you bounce between sites, and there are no practical benefits to doing so.

[Revolution_Inc]

Cheers for the reply Gareth.

Assuming our domain authority wasn't impressive. Would tailoring 4 websites towards each specific service actually allow us to increase our domain authority? Essentially allowing our content to be much more specific on each domain? Or would it still be better to keep everything under one umbrella in your opinion?

[SEO-Doctor]

A massive part of SEO if getting domain authority, this is what you would split by having different sites...everything would get diluted.