If I am starting a new business, similar to my existing business...
-
Howdy MOZ community, I hope you are enjoying the last days of summer as much as we are here in Toronto-Canada.I own an Air Duct Cleaning business, I have done the web design as well as SEO, My website is currently ranking for quite a few keywords (some of them on the top of the SERPS) special thanks to MOZ for their awesome tools and blog posts.I am starting a Mobile Car Detailing business, Despite the fact that my Duct Cleaning domain is 5 years old with a DA of 42 and PA of 40 (main page).Would it be better for me to just add pages to my existing website (despite the fact that both businesses are in a cleaning niche) or would it be better for me to start another website from scratch?
Would it be a bonus for me in terms of my current DA to add pages to my existing website.like for example:
www.mywebsite.ca/Mobile-Auto-Detailing
or would I get penalized for it?
I thank you all for answering my question.
Alex
-
Hey Alex!
Christy invited me to pop by. Your 2 businesses exist in two totally separate categories, in Google's eyes: 'Air Duct Cleaning Service' and 'Car Detailing', so provided that you meet the following requirements, you should have no problems with running 2 legally separate businesses, even if they are both being run out of your home:
-
Have a separate phone number for each business that is always answered with the correct company name.
-
Have separate websites for each, with completely unique content on them (no shared content).
-
Do not interlink your sites in an attempt to cross promote them.
-
Build a unique citation set for each. Don't try to piggyback one business onto the other in your local business listings.
If you can meet all of the above requirements, you'll likely be best served by going with 2 unique businesses. If your categories were related (like Car Detailing and Car Wash) I'd be giving just the opposite advice, but as your two service types have nothing to do with one another, I vote for running two legally distinct companies. Hope this helps!
-
-
Aww, we all knew what you meant by SERPS. It makes them sound like something very important, and well, they are. ;)In the short-term, sure, the DA of your existing site has the potential to give any pages you add to it a little boost in terms of authority, provided that the pages are easy to find (i.e., they are crawlable, not too deep in your site architecture, are linked to from important pages on the site, etc.).
Now, back to your question. In the short-term, sure, the DA of your existing site has the potential to give any pages you add to it a little boost in terms of authority, provided that the pages are easy to find (i.e., they are crawlable, not too deep in your site architecture, are linked to from important pages on the site, etc.).
BUT in the long-term, I can't really say if taking this route has the potential to harm your whole site -- as we still need more information about how you are structuring your business(es) for these two categories of cleaning services, if the new one will have its own branding or not, and how the markets for each one compare beyond both being consumer markets (including service areas -- are those different, overlapping, or the same)?
In the meantime, I'm going to grab one of my colleagues who specializes in Local SEO to see if she can you can give you any insight into how the path you go down may affect your performance in local search results.
-
Hi Christy thanks for your reply, I stand corrected on "SERPs".
They are both actually B2Cs, I looked at Sears website and they offer quite different services related in cleaning niche, they offer air duct cleaning, carpet cleaning, residential and commercial cleaning services as well as bunch of other services all from the same website.So I am just wondering would my current DA and the age of my domain be a benefit for my new venture? Or should I just start another website from scratch.
Thanks for your reply.
Alex
-
From purely a customer point of view, I would setup a brand new website for this second business. I would much prefer the appearance that a company is a specialist in a single field than attempting to do everything.
-
Hi Alex, welcome to the Q&A forum -- and thanks for your kind words about our tools and blog. We're very glad they're helping you successfully rank your existing business website in the SERPs.
You refer to your mobile car detailing business as a new business. I am curious, are you actually setting it up as a business distinct from your air duct cleaning business, and will it have its own branding? And how do the markets for each one compare? (I'm guessing they are very different, with one B2B and the other B2C but I don't know what I don't know.)
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
-
Do old backlinks still help with new URL with 301 redirect? Also I added the www. How does this affect it all?
I changed my URL from exampledetailing. com to exampleautodetailing. com. It is redirected with a 301. Also, it is on Squarespace AND I opted to add the www. So will the old backlinks of exampledetailing. com still help the new URL exampleautodetailing. com or do I need to try and update all the links? Also, future links, do I need to include the www. or just the root domain of exampleautodetailing. com or even the whole https://wwwexampleautodetailing. com? I believe the www is considered a sub domain and a new entity on Google, so I am not sure how that works. Thank you!
Local Website Optimization | | Rmarkjr810 -
How to Get google to get to index New URL and not the OLD url
Hi Team, We are undertaking a Domain migration activity to migrate our content frrom one domain to another. 1. the Redirection of pages is handeled at Reverse proxy level. 2. We do have 301 redirects put in place. However we still see that google is indexing pages with our Old domain apart from the pages from new domain. Is there a way for us to stop google from indexing our pages from Old domain. The recommendations to have Noindex on Page mete title and disallow does not work since our redirection is setup at RP and google crawlers always discover the new pages after redirection.
Local Website Optimization | | bhaskaran0 -
I have a USA Shopify store and want to create a UK store. Should I use a domain or a sub-domain for the new store?
I'm currently running 2x Shopify Stores (names changed from actual): "coolpants.com" is our UK store "us.coolpants.com" is our USA store However, Google Analytics has shown that most of the traffic to "coolpants.com" comes from the USA, and this market has our biggest growth potential. So we want to switch our domain setup to the below: Make "coolpants.com" our USA store Stop using "us.coolpants.com" and redirect it to "coolpants.com" Set up our UK store as a new domain ("coolpants.co.uk) or subdomain ("uk.coolpants.com") My question is – should I set up the UK store as a domain or a sub-domain? What are the pros and cons of each? Thank you in advance for any help!
Local Website Optimization | | benkapow0 -
Question about partial duplicate content on location landing pages of multilocation business
Hi everyone, I am a psychologist in private practice in Colorado and I recently went from one location to 2 locations. I'm currently updating my website to better accommodate the second location. I also plan continued expansion in the future, so there will be more and more locations as time goes on. As a result, I am making my websites current homepage non-location specific and creating location landing pages as I have seen written about in many places. My question is: I know that location landing pages should have unique content, and I have plenty of this, but how much content is it also okay to have be duplicate across the location landing pages and the homepage? For instance, here is the current draft of the new homepage (these are not live yet): http://www.effectivetherapysolutions.com/dev/ And here are the drafts of the location landing pages: http://www.effectivetherapysolutions.com/dev/denver-office http://www.effectivetherapysolutions.com/dev/colorado-springs-office And for reference, here is the current homepage that is actually live for my single Denver location: http://www.effectivetherapysolutions.com/ As you can see, the location landing pages have the following sections of unique content: Therapist picture at the top testimonial quotes (the one on the homepage is the only thing I have I framed in this block from crawl so that it appears as unique content on the Denver page) therapist bios GMB listing driving directions and hours and I also haven't added these yet, but we will also have unique client success stories and appropriately tagged images of the offices So that's plenty of unique content on the pages, but I also have the following sections of content that are identical or nearly identical to what I have on the homepage: Intro paragraph blue and green "adult" and child/teen" boxes under the intro paragraph "our treatment really works" section "types of anxiety we treat" section Is that okay or is that too much duplicate content? The reason I have it that way is that my website has been very successful for years at converting site visitors into paying clients, and I don't want to lose aspects of the page that I know work when people land on it. And now that I am optimizing the location landing pages to be where people end up instead of the homepage, I want them to still see all of that content that I know is effective at conversion. If people on here do think it is too much, one possible solution is to turn parts of it into pictures or put them into I-frames on the location pages so Google doesn't crawl those parts of the location pages, but leave them normal on the homepage so it still gets crawled on there. I've seen a lot written about not having duplicate content on location landing pages for this type of website, but everything I've read seems to refer to entire pages being copied with just the location names changed, which is not what I'm doing, hence my question. Thanks everyone!
Local Website Optimization | | gremmy90 -
If we are a local based business, what is the best approach to tracking keywords? Shall we be micro tracking?
we are a local based business and we only have one physical property but we service a 15 mile radius (people within a 15 mile radius will use our services) when it comes to keyword tracking and monitoring should we just be looking at the 3 main local towns or should we go out to the villages around our area too? at what level shall we be micro tracking? do we go to such a micro level for tracking keywords for all the villages which creates a lot of keywords for the locations? what is the best approach?
Local Website Optimization | | Mutatio_Digital0 -
Multi Location business - Should I 301 redirect duplicate location pages or alternatively No Follow tag them ?
Hello All, I have a eCommerce site and we operate out of mulitple locations. We currently have individual location pages for these locations against each of our many categories. However on the flip slide , this create alot of duplicate content. All of our location pages whether unique or duplicated have a unique title Tag, H1, H2 tag , NAP and they all bring in the City Name . The content on the duplicated content also brings in the City name as well. We have been going through our categories and writing unique content for our most popular locations to help rank on local search. Currently I've been setting up 301 redirects for the locations in the categories with the duplicated content pointing back to the category page. I am wondering whether the increase in number of 301's will do more harm than having many duplicate location pages ?.. I am sure my site is affected by the panda algorithm penalty(on the duplicated content issues) as a couple of years ago , this didn't matter and we ranked top 3 for pretty much for every location but now we are ranking between 8 - 20th depending on keyword. An Alternative I thought, may be to instead of 301 those locations pages with duplicate content, is to put No Follow tags on them instead ?... What do you think ?. It's not economically viable to write unique content for every location on every category and these would not only take years but would cost us far to much money. Our Site is currently approx 10,000 pages Any thoughts on this greatly appreciated ? thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Rebranding a Website to a new Domain Name
Hi All, I'm looking to rebrand my current website to a new domain name.
Local Website Optimization | | Mark_Ch
In short the current website has out grown it's potential. The domain name is not memorable nor is it attracting a wider audience.
I will create my new website and 301 redirect the old website to the new, hence pass SEO value. Google Places
Having spoken to Google they tell me that I can simply change the URL in Google Places to the new URL. Articles on my current website
I have a number of rich content articles on my current website, can I simply create my new website and copy & paste these previously written articles? Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
What should I do for accounts associated with the current website? Any other useful information would be much appreciated. Regards Mark0 -
Is translating my SEO meta data to new languages worthwhile?
When translating a website to additional languages, is it recommended, for Google SEO purposes, that the keywords, re-written URLs, meta titles and meta descriptions of each page be translated as well; or have those elements been completely depreciated?
Local Website Optimization | | sptechnologies0