Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
One domain or two for one company with two lines of business?
-
Let's say you are building a new company that is involved in two lines of business. Let's for example say one line of business is handling logistics for large conventions where the customer(s) are large corporation and the other line is for wedding planning. Let's say that for certain reasons the owner wants to operate under one brand name, say "PROEVENT" So they will market themselves as PROEVENT Convention Logistics and PROEVENT Wedding Planners.
From an SEO perspective, if you have one side of the business doing B-to-B corporate business and the other doing B-to-C do you create two different websites on different domains (proeventconventions.com and proeventweddings.com) with unique design and content, or, do you just use provent.com in order to build better domain authority and on your marketing you use conventions.provent.com that takes you to the convention section of the website and weddings.provent.com takes you to the weddings section?
-
Hi Jazee,
At the end of the day, this ultimately comes down to what you think is best for the company. I do agree with the other answers that building these out as two separate sites could be a better option. And I am going to add on a few more factors that I think you should consider before making this decision. Because the services are so different, you will be able to get target the website (think: backlink outreach) if the website is on one specific topic rather than focusing on multiple services.
However, if these are on one website, you should be able to grow the domain authority more quickly because in theory you could have double the amount of backlinks (link from websites for each service) linking to the one domain.
-
Very good points.
Maybe a more interesting and important question becomes, what are the main decision points (criteria) for when you DO use one domain. For discussion sake, let me throw out a somewhat different hypothetical situation.
Let's say it's a Photography business that focuses on two main types of service. One type is Wedding Photography, the other type is Commercial Real Estate Photography. Again, the similarity with the previous situation is one is a B2C and the other is a B2B. But here I think the type of service is closer between the too so maybe a more difficult decision?
I think maybe the first question you may need to ask is by taking a step back and asking realistically where is your business going to come from? From my own personal experience knowing a lot of people that have gotten married it seems that a very large portion of Wedding Photographers get their business via referrals. Not Google organic search results. In the B2B sector, in many spaces it also holds true that many business relationships are formed via networking/referrals. Back on the Wedding Photography side, I'd venture to say out of the non-word of mouth sources, Yelp might be actually more important than Google. SEO is pretty much irrelevant as far as ranking on Yelp.
SO... I think the first question you have to ask is, do I anticipate a majority of my business will come from people finding me through Google Maps or Google Organic Search results, versus word of mouth and business directories like Yelp. If the answer is NO, the SEO benefit of the single versus multiple website structure becomes less important IMHO.
Let's assume though the majority will come from Google Maps and Organic Results (even though there's also the option of doing Adwords). So what are the next important questions to ask?
1. How different are the two lines of business? (the obvious question which has already been discussed)
2. Will a potential client be less confident about or less impressed with the business if they see the business doesn't specialize in the service being sought? A tough question to answer but I think more likely the answer is yes in the event planning example and possibly NO in the photography example. A good photographer is a good photographer IMHO.
3. How much resources are going to be available to create on an ongoing basis different content on two different websites? Do you have the time to write two different blogs? This may be a more minor consideration though as these types of businesses don't need extremely fresh and rapidly updated blogs.
4. Is the competition for the primary keywords for the two lines of business low, medium, high for the target audience/geography? Maybe this is actually the most important. With separate sites, you can optimize the domain name, title tag, keyword density, etc. for that line of business more so than if you have one site since there is only one root home page. But that may be offset in part or in whole by the diluted domain authority if you do two sites. But if the ranking competition is low, then this isn't as big of a factor in the decision?
Which factor(s) are most important in the decision? Other deciding factors?
-
Absolutely agree with James - the businesses are just too different to be on the same domain. If I were Google looking at a site that offers wedding photography and then logistics, I would wonder which one it is meant to be.
Some businesses can carry this off if they are sufficiently similar, but not in a case such as this.
-Andy
-
Hi Jazee,
I would say that, while there are advantages of having the two lines of business on the same domain (such as having to build domain authority for one website instead of two), from an SEO perspective your optimisation tactics will differ between the two business services.
For example, your link building for the Wedding Planners side of the business will likely require different strategies to Convention Logistics. For this reason, if it were my company, I would keep them on separate domains. There would also be other considerations, such as your content strategy and whether you will have a blog for both, one for each, or no blog at all.
This does depend on factors such as your SEO plans for the businesses, how closely linked the two sides are, how much you can invest in SEO, whether your domains are both starting from scratch (i.e. no domain authority).
In the long run you'll have one website optimised for Wedding Planners and another optimised for Convention Logistics, which in my opinion is better than one website that is split between two different industries.
Hope this helps.
Best regards,
James
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
-
Combining Two Sites With Similar Domain Authority
Hello, We run two sites with the same product, product descriptions and url structure. Essentially, the two sites are the same except for domain name and minor differences on the home pages. We've run this way for quite a few years. Both sites have a domain authority of 48 and there are not a large number of duplicate incoming links. I understand the "book" to say we should combine the sites with 301's to the similar pages. I am concerned about doing this because "site 2" still does about 20% of our business. We have been losing organic traffic for a number of years. I think this mainly has to do with a more competitive environment. However, where google used to serve both our sites for a search term it now will only show one. How much organic benefit should we see if we combine. Will it be significant enough to merge the two sites. Understandably, I realize the future can't be predicted but I would like to know if anyone has had a similar experience or opinion Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ffctas0 -
Two divisions, same parent company, identical websites
A client of mine has intentionally built two websites with identical content; both companies sell the same product, one via an 80 year old local brand, well known. The other division is a national brand, new, and working to expand. The old and new divisions cannot be marketed as a single company for legal reasons. My life would be simple if the rules for distinguishing between nation's could apply, but I only have city X, and The U.S. I understand there is no penalty for duplicate content per se but I need to say to Google, "if searcher is in city X, serve content X. If not, serve content U.S. Both sites have atrocious DA and from what GA tells me, the National content appears to have never been served in a SERP in 3 years. I've been asked to improve visibility for both sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kc_sunshines0 -
One domain - Multiple servers
Can I have the root domain pointing to one server and other URLs on the domain pointing to another server without redirecting, domain masking or HTML masking? Dealing with an old site that is a mess. I want to avoid migrating the old website to the new environment. I want to work on a page by page and section by section basis, and whatever gets ready to go live I will release on the new server while keeping all other pages untouched and live on the old server. What are your recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Why is my domain authority still 1?
I changed the domain of my website from www.vanillacrush.co.uk to www.carissamay.co.uk at the end of December and yet my DA for carissamay is still 1. As advised, I set up a 301 redirect from VC to CM which seems to be working fine. However when I check on redirect detective it tells me I also have a 302 set up. Could this be confusing things? http://www.vanillacrush.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carissamayhttp://www.vanillacrush.co.uk/
http://www.carissamay.co.uk
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks
0 -
Backlinks from old domain
Hi, We have gone through a change of company brand name including a new domain name.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agguk
We followed google recommendations at: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en and it seems to have worked really well, the new domain has replaced the old in the google search results. My question: Still most of our backlinks, both anchor text and links use the old brand name and domain and it´s a slow process trying to update all references. Although they get redirected fine to the new domain (also following google recommendations), I wonder if the current scenario is doing any harm, SEO wise (other than the missed visual exposure of the new brand name) ? ...since the old brand name is not present at the new site I´m thinking of including "New brand name - previously old brand name" somewhere just to provide some sort of connection to all old backlinks, would that be unnecessary? I should mention that the old brand name actually includes our most important keyword but the new brand name does not. Thanks!0 -
Two blogs on a single domain?
Hi guys, Does anyone have any experience of having (trying to rank) two separate blogs existing on one domain, for instance: www.companysite.com/service1/blogwww.companysite.com/service2/blogThese 2 pages (service 1 and service 2) offer completely different services (rank for different keywords).(for example, a company that provides 2 separate services: SEO service and IT service)Do you think it is a good/bad/confusing search engine practice trying to have separate blogs for each service or do you think there should be only one blog that contains content for both services?Bearing in mind that there is an already existing subdomain for a non-profit part of business that ranks for different keywords: non-profit.companysite.comand it will potentially have another blog so the URL would look like: non-profit.companysite.com/blogAny ideas would be appreciated!Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellys.marketing0 -
Microsites: Subdomain vs own domains
I am working on a travel site about a specific region, which includes information about lots of different topics, such as weddings, surfing etc. I was wondering whether its a good idea to register domains for each topic since it would enable me to build backlinks. I would basically keep the design more or less the same and implement a nofollow navigation bar to each microsite. e.g.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kinimod
weddingsbarcelona.com
surfingbarcelona.com or should I rather go with one domain and subfolders: barcelona.com/weddings
barcelona.com/surfing I guess the second option is how I would usually do it but I just wanted to see what are the pros/cons of both options. Many thanks!0 -
Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?
I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken. Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have? Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)? Many thanks for any help with this matter. Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoSheikh0