2 Websites Targeting Similar Keywords
-
One of my clients is set on setting up another website targeting some of the keywords/services on the main site.
One of the services they offer gets traffic from natural search and also Adwords but doesn't convert well for this service. For other services (which are often utilized at the same time by the customers) the site converts well.
My client feels that... "people are not converting on the main site because they click on the page and realise that we are a wider company. From this they probably work out that we don’t actually produce Green Widgets and we just buy them in. Therefore we will be more expensive than a company who does manufacture Green Widgets (although there are only a few in the country who actually make them)."
The new site "...will have more of a manufacturer and specialist feel. There will be a small mention of other services. People visiting will think we are specialists and that we make them, whereas at the moment they may feel that they are just being cross sold a product. We have also noticed that we are not being found earlier enough and we are contacted to do other work only to find that another company is providing the Green Widgets."
I did something similar back in the day, but here we ran a local website and a national website covering the same products. We tried hard not to duplicate the keywords we targeted minimising this as much as possible. I don't think we cared much about the local site as the national one went crazy busy.
In essence, my client wants to do the following:
Main Site...
Blue Widgets Bristol
Red Widgets Bristol
Green Widgets Bristol (This would be retained)New Site...
The new site would focus on Green WidgetsIn time the new site would include content for...
Green Widgets
Green Widgets Bristol (As per the main site)
Green Widgets CardiffIt would also make mention of Blue Widgets and Red Widgets as possible addons.
The new site would be at the same address but have its own companies house registration, emails and phone numbers.
My feeling is that we should take an above-board, risk-free approach and remove the Green Widgets service from the main site to ensure it doesn't upset Google. In other words go out of our way to minimise targeting of similar/same keywords across the 2 sites.
My client strongly disagrees showing evidence of others using similar tactics (we have had the EMD debate as well).
I am also concerned about Google Places and how this might be viewed here.
Opinions please, also any idea of what if any action Google would take if we push forwards?
-
I'll certainly take Miriam's word for it. I guess I'm out of date on google local. Thanks for the heads up.
-
Just checked out https://moz.com/blog/gmb-multiple-businesses-same-address
From what I can see from the above as long as the business names are distinctly different it should be OK.
Or perhaps if the services are the same this won't be enough and we will have to maintain a single listing with just one of the brand names.
It's not 100% clear from the article.
-
As per guidelines, I don't think there's a problem either way. Algorithmicly, it seems like it would take some time to build up the authority of the new site but that would be normal. I still think you may have an address issue with GMB, though.
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks, for your reply I was quite concerned about GMB, the addresses won't be different. Is there a way around this plenty of business (legitimately) do have the same address. My concern is that the services would overlap, both on the websites themselves but also categories in third party citations.
Also yes we did check and competitors are involved in similar practices. One does well with an EMD although we are not going down this route.
-
I think I'd be more concerned about your google my business than the overlap in the sites, especially if the content is different. But, have you or the client examined the backlinks and authority of the other sites using similar tactics? The bottom of the search results is chock full of sites who used some tactic or another because they thought that was what was working for a competitor, when, in fact, it wasn't.
You would need different phone numbers and physical addresses to differentiate the "two" businesses in GMB.
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
-
Low competition Related Keywords
Hi everyone, I have a blog with product review articles on the best wireless Bluetooth headphones. It is a vast niche and I am finding it hard to rank on this main keyword. Is it a good practice to work on the longtail, related keywords with low competition, so I can keep my blog in the serps? Do you think this will affect my ranking for the main keyword? Please advise, Thank you!
Local SEO | | Salman425520 -
What is the best structured data for my website
We have 10:branches for our agency where we are looking to attract local businesses to use our marketing services, should each landing page have structured data for ‘local business’? Any advice would be helpful
Local SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Keyword and Branded Title Tags Site Wide
I have a client who is using a structure like this for site wide title tags: Page specific keyword | Brand Name | Industry specific keyword + locations So in an example it'd look like: Drupal Development | BrandName | Web Services for Los Angeles, San Fransisco, New York I've researched this structure pretty thoroughly to be able to make a case for or against doing this site wide.
Local SEO | | culturefoundry
However, I've received many mixed signals on many things. My questions are as follows: Should brand name be last in this structure? Does it matter? The length of this is obviously causing truncated Title in search results, so which is more useful? Is using a keyword intended for site ranking like "Web Services", "Digital Agency", "SEO Specialist" useful for every page to have or damaging? Is this cannibalizing that keyword? Is having multiple locations on every page title helping, hurting, or neutral It seems like all these things could go either way to me, but I don't want to tell them one way or another without having some more detailed explanations to give them. Thanks for your help!0 -
One website or multiple websites
Im going round in circles with the best way to go about marketting my business from an SEO and usability stand point. My company specialise in self adhesive films and vinyls which give us quite a varied niche. Our main areas are: Window films and interior vinyls such as printed wallpaper, wall coverings, furniture wraps etc for homes and businesses - For this area we cover nationwide Automotive films such as car window tinting, car and van wraps and paint protection films - for this we need the vehicles bringing to us so this is a more local are (around 20 miles of us max) Signs and graphics - anything from office signs, pavement signs to printed banners - these are all commercial and we go to the customer. For this its a new side to the business and Id say wed look to go withing 50 miles of our base. My dilemma is, firstly when pushing social media etc we have a real divide for who we target as we have the home owers and business owners on one hand and then car enthusiasts on the other. Also from an SEO point of view theres the local vs nationwide aspect. A few people I have spoken to have said trying to target local for some services and national for others may be a little problematic. I have some people saying have all services under one domain as the links back to the site and content will all help the site to rank better. This sounds logical to me. But then Ive had other people saying split the site into 2/3 sites. Definitely split the automotive which is local from the other national areas as these are also going to be a different audience 9car enthusiasts vs home/business owners). It will mean doing two lots of SEO but the sites will be more focused on the target audience and we can have one tagret local search and the other national. This too seems very logical. My gut feeling is that both options are sort of right but doesn anyone have any advice that could help me figure this out. Also to make things a little more complicated we have an ecommerce side were we supply goods direct to the public. Woudl I be better to have a fresh domain which is simply an ecommerce platform or have a seperate shop section on my main domain were people can go to buy the products if they dont want us to fit them?
Local SEO | | paulfoz16091 -
Any benefit of Geo Targeting in Organic Positions?
Hi All, Can anyone please guide me on Geo Targeting for Google Organic Improvement? Thanks!
Local SEO | | wright3350 -
Suggestion "How can I improve my website"
Hi Folks , I'm trying to help my friend , I need your suggestion. I gathered all the data , Please find the attachment , our spam score is 5 as compared with competitors 0 root domain 0 total links 1.)How can we increase the page authority ? 2.)Should i buy more backlinks ? Which website you will recommend me ? 3.) How can i reduce my spam score to 0 or 1 ? I'm not sure about the links which are attached to my website? However, I read in moz article it could be because large domain and few links. It doesn't show any thing on open site explorer. It looks like we haven't discovered link data for this site or URL. We are running google ads , Facebooks ads and twitter. MpYq1
Local SEO | | hemantt0 -
Lots of [keyword]in[city].com domains - what to do?
A client of mine had purchased a lot of domains. They all start with the same keyword following by "in" following by a cities name. The cities are all the cities around their location. They had the pages set up to all look the same with very small differences in content. A bunch of duplicate content. All of them have a DA of 8 and PA of 19. There are 35 of them total. They get roughly 30-60 hits a month each but it's mostly all spam. The idea was for users to type in [keyword] in [city] in Google and these websites show up. A competitor of my clients had done something similar which was working for them. The main website (separate of these) gets ~1500 visits per month of non spam traffic and gets ~10 referrals from these websites. What should be done with these domains? Chalk it off as a bad idea and have them 301 to the main website until they expire? Or can they be changed into something useful? If so, how? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Note: I did search for this similar topic but it was hard to search it out and I did not find an answer. Thanks!
Local SEO | | RedKeyDesigns0 -
How to remove countries viewing my website
Hi All, I operate from the UK only. How can I exclude select countries from viewing both my organic website and Google Adwords listing. Organic Website
Local SEO | | Mark_Ch
Are the any free online services that give you a simple click + download/view script to cut & paste into a .htaccess file. Google Adwords
Ditto as above with the exception to paste the IP list into Campaign | Setting Tab | Advanced settings - IP exclusions Thanks Mark0