I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?

[KIGUCREW]

Hello.

I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help.

I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day.

We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks.

The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message.

I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves.

Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit?

Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one?

Any help and advice would be much appreciated.

Tom.

[KIGUCREW]

Hi Guys

Thank you all for your responses. It seems pretty definitive that I should go for the root domain option.

I do have one more thing to ask though. If I do switch the site back to the root domain, should I still keep the Kigu Kids domain going too? Considering it's already ranking in Google around number 7?

Tom.

[EGOL]

Yep.... That surprised me too.

[icecarats]

Agree with Egol; there's just so much synergy available here that I don't think any kind of SEO benefit from segmenting the sites would be worth it. It helps that the age of the micro-site/keyword stuffed domains seems to be behind us. I also disagree with the premise that kids are a different target market, because they rarely have credit cards and are shopping online unmonitored. I think segmenting would make sense if the categories and/or audiences were more diverse, but there are many commonalities here that I think would be better served by existing on the same site.

EDIT-Also I saw the clothes and... wow I guess that's a thing. I'm surprised the kids category didn't come >first<

[William.Lau]

My recommendation is to just use the root domain. Create a subfolder or category just for kids.

The link juice will stay the same and most importantly, your current customers are just customers and buyers. Unless you ranked keywords are like 'blah blah blah for adults' or anything related to being only for adults, your site should not limit itself to adults only.

Have a different section for kids within the root domain is VERY normal, its just growth. It is a great thing that you are able and willing to offer a kids section and this is good business.

Final thoughts: keep it within root domain, it is just better for business and can attract more awareness that "hey you offer kid costumes too!"

[EGOL]

If I owned this business I would not have to think about this question very long at all.

I would build the kids products into the current site.  There are many reasons why I would do this, and SEO is one of the lesser reasons.

With one site you can have fantastic cross selling.  Mother visits the site looking for her own costume and decides to get the same costume for her kids..  Now you sold three of them instead of one.  Same could happen the other way... mother looking for kids costume and decides to buy same for herself and maybe dad.  Now you sold four costumes to one customer.

You know how much more profitable the large shopping cart sales are compared to small shopping cart sales.

Also, you only have one site to maintain, one product database, one hosting, one security certificate, lots of savings of money and time.

This is wayyyy stronger branding.  Everybody talking about one great site instead of a couple small sites.

For SEO your current domain has great rankings and authority.  I guarantee that new kids product pages added to this site will rank immediately better than same pages on a new site with zero authority.

For popularity... mom shows photo of kids costume on facebook or her blog.. this gives a link or a "like" and spreads the word.  All of this attention is focused on ONE SITE not divided between two.

So, I say that you should DO THIS TODAY and stop spinning your wheels.  You will be making a lot more money right away!