I have a general site for my insurance agency. Should I create niche sites too?
-
I work with several insurance agencies and I get this questions several times each month. Most agencies offer personal and business insurance and in a certain geographic location.
I recommend creating a quality general agency site but would they have more success creating other nice sites as well? For example, a niche site about home insurance and one about auto insurance.
What would your recommendation be?
-
I would have to agree. If you keep to a single domain, you don't have to spread your budget and effort out between other domains. Any piece of content you create can then, possibly, influence your entire domain.
-
Highly agree with Matt! Creating many other websites will divide your efforts and you might not be able to achieve what you can within a single website.
When all the linking will be under one domain the domain authority as a whole will increase, which will help the sub pages to come up from the desired key phrases.
When you will be working on the promotion and branding side, it will help you get tons of words out and which help you get natural links from verity of websites to single domain and branding will go high (online and offline)
Talking from my experience, Insurance in not at all an easy industry so even making separate websites will require lots and lots of work so my idea is to have sub pages under one domain so that all your efforts points to one domain and sub pages can win the business accordingly.
-
I agree with Matt. Build great content and Authority on one domain name and focus your strength and efforts there. Don't divide them too much. That way all the efforts you do within this site, helps and complements each and every page on the website. Works better long term.
-
I would probably recommend not sites, but landing pages.
yourinsurancesite.com/business
This way you keep the bulk of the SEO on one domain (as opposed to subdomains or niche site domains). You also stay with one login for all edits, etc. which helps streamline. Then, you can easily run campaigns to these main subfolders and track analytics per type of ins. more accurately.
I would say subfolders per agency would be the easiest and most logical SEO solution. There will be situations where this isn't necessarily the best (very big companies can usually afford to do proper SEO more than one domain and then having more domains can benefit you in the long run.) But for most insurance agencies and this type of sub-agency, I would think subfolders would be best. One of my best friends runs his own State Farm agency and they run it similarly.
http://www.statefarm.com/ agent/US/STATE/TOWN/AGENT-NAME-UID
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
-
Redirecting Pages During Site Migration
Hi everyone, We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land: The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration. For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains. Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
How Does Yelp Create URLs?
Hi all, How does Yelp (or other sites) go about creating URLs for just about every service and city possible ending with the search? in the URL like this https://www.yelp.com/search?cflt=chiropractors&find_loc=West+Palm+Beach%2C+FL. They clearly aren't creating all of these pages, so how do you go about setting a meta title/optimization formula that allows these pages to exist AND to be crawled by search engines and indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Site Has Not Recovered (Still!) from Penguin
Hello, I have a site that just keeps getting hit with a ton of bad, unnatural backlinks due to the sins from previous SEO companies they've hired. About every quarter, I have to add more bad links to their disavow file... still. Is it time to move them to a new domain? Perhaps a .net? If so, do we just completely trash the old domain & not redirect it? I've never had a client like this in the past but they still want to maintain their branded name. Thanks for your feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinaMumm0 -
Site Architecture: How flat is too flat?
There's a lot of debate out there as far as too many internal links or too many levels of a website. I've seen the videos from Rand and I've read a lot of the posts here on Moz, but I just want to know where everyone stands on this. Anyone have experience with architecture while working on a large E-commerce site? We're talking Millions of pages and over 1,000 links off the homepage alone. Anyways, I don't want to get too specific. I mostly just want to hear about experiences of the community. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Want to merge high ranking niche websites into a new mega site, but don't want to lose authority from old top level pages
I have a few older websites that SERP well, and I am considering merging some or all of them into a new related website that I will be launching regardless. My old websites display real estate listings and not much else. Each website is devoted to showing homes for sale in a specific neighborhood. The domains are all in the form of Neighborhood1CityHomes.com, Neighborhood2CityHomes.com, etc. These sites SERP well for searches like "Neighborhood1 City homes for sale" and also "Neighborhood1 City real estate" where some or all of the query is in the domain name. Google simply points to the top of the domain although each site has a few interior pages that are rarely used. There is next to zero backlinking to the old domains, but each links to the other with anchor text like "Neighborhood1 Cityname real estate". That's pretty much the extent of the link profile. The new website will be a more comprehensive search portal where many neighborhoods and cities can be searched. The domain name is a nonsense word .com not related to actual key words. The structure will be like newdomain.com/cityname/neighborhood-name/ where the neighborhood real estate listings are that would replace the old websites, and I'd 301 the old sites to the appropriate internal directories of the new site. The content on the old websites is all on the home page of each, at least the content for searches that matter to me and rank well, and I read an article suggesting that Google assigns additional authority for top level pages (can I link to that here?). I'd be 301-ing each old domain from a top level to a 3rd level interior page like www. newdomain/cityname/neighborhood1/. The new site is better than the old sites by a wide margin, especially on mobile, but I don't want to lose all my top positions for some tough phrases. I'm not running analytics on the old sites in question, but each of the old sites has extensive past history with AdWords (which I don't run any more). So in theory Google knows these old sites are good quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gogogomez0 -
More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site. I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration. Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K). Anyone got any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Panda/Penguin & Ecommerce Sites in similar niches
Hello, We have a few online stores that are in similar niches. How do we make sure that we don't get penalized for this (Panda/Penguin) We have the sites interlinked, but our newest one is not going to be linked to the others. Also, will rewriting descriptions help if the product is on more than one site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0