2 Ecommerce sites & SEO

[SnowFX]

Hi, i am managing 2 ecommerce sites that sell a lot of identical products.

snowsupermarket.co.uk - public webshop

shop.snowbusiness.com - trade webshop

Should i optimise the 2 sites to target different keywords for all products or, should i keep the keywords the same but, vary the meta data/ description etc. to avoid duplication.

Is there a clear argument to have to ecommerce websites ranking high for our products & dominating page 1, even though they will be technically competing against each other?

Thanks,

Ben

[SnowFX]

Great! - thanks for your help

You were right about the search terms. I looked at site search through GWT and both types of customer use a slightly different language & i will use this data & add it to my keywords for each site.

Cheers,

Ben

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

To answer your specific question, I'd target different keywords.

That said, why do you have two different websites selling the same products?  If you are just trying to get two rankings in the top ten or rank for more keywords, I'd suggest that you are better off just having one site and building the authority of that one site up instead of trying split your efforts.  If there is a legit user-based reason to have two sites than I would think the two different target groups may have their own search phrases and way of speaking which should determine your keywords and the text on your site

I'm guessing that "public webshop" and "trade webshop" indicate that you are targeting the general public with one site and people working in the industry with the other.  You'll need to familiarize yourself (if you aren't already familiar) with the terminology that the two groups use and have that guide your decisions.  It's not something you'll be able to pick up on from keyword tools since they would just give raw data not indicating which group was searching for what keywords.

Even if you are targeting two different groups, I wonder if you couldn't just have two sections withing a single site instead of two completely different sites.  I'm not saying two sites is always bad or anything, there are good reasons to do it in some situations, I just think that when building the authority of websites, it's almost always easier and more effective to focus on just one site instead of two or more.

Hope this helps.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com