Is it possible to rank a second site, for my buisness, for the same location?

[MissThumann]

I have an insurance agency, and recently set up a new site, specifically for personal lines insurance.

My question is; Is it worth trying to rank this site, by using backlinks and unique content?

It will have the same address, and location as my main site.

I'm also concerned Google may frown on that.. Any input appreciated.

[Morningdove]

I have had clients request to build two sites at once, launch them, and see which one is favored more in Google's eyes. Same thing with individual pages-- "G" seems to like one and bury the other.

Building one on the side when the existing site is already indexed is probably going to be a risky venture.

[Hurf]

If you are trying to rank two sites, owned by the same company for the same (or VERY similar) products/services at the same address, with content that can never be anything other than very closely related I'd suggest that this will look (rightly or wrongly) like you're game the system and Google don't like that at all. A read through of Google's Webmaster Guidelines might help you get a better understanding of what they consider to be good (and bad) practice: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

Is there any scope for you to simply bring a personal lines insurance section under your main agency site, for example? I'd expect greater success doing this as you're not trying to get two bites of the cherry.

If you were to go with a separate site, you can openly use the same content across both sites by using rel=“canonical” tags to indicate to Google (other search engines are available)  that given URLs are effectively carrying the same content - Ideal if you have content that is accessible across multiple websites - as this will not impact negatively on your rankings. That said, unless there is some industry specific regulation that dictates you cannot be part of insurance agency I'd be keen to keep it on the straight and narrow and build all the content under one roof.

If you want to increase your visibility, you can potentially appear twice on the page by running a very tightly targeted AdWords campaign (you can run it for a small geographic radius) - perfect if you typically deal with local customers, face to face.

Whatever way you approach this, the potential short-term gain of beating the system (i.e. having two sites running for very similar searches) is not worth the potential long-term pain of getting caught out.

Good luck