One domain or two for one company with two lines of business?

[Jazee]

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?

[BlueCorona]

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.

[Jazee]

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?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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

[mcmnetjames]

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