Two websites vs. one for SEO
-
I recently met with a new potential client who currently has two websites for his business - one that is for the business as a whole and another that is specific to one of his particular services (his main service and what the overall business is known for).
My first question was "why do you have two websites?" His response was that he has had a really hard time ranking well organically for his main service. He worked with an SEO company for two years and never was able to establish a solid organic presence for searches related to his main service - so he went ahead and had a site built to focus specifically on that service with the hope that it would help him rank organically for searches related to that service. The new site was built very recently (Dec. 2014) and it hasn't had a lot of optimization work put into it. The original site has a much higher Domain Authority, more incoming links, etc.
My typical preference has always been to use one website and drive all traffic to that site, while building out specific content for any products/services on individual pages of the site. For some reason I'm torn as to what to do with this particular situation since his main concern is ranking for his core service, which hasn't happened with the original site. I'm concerned, though, that optimizing and managing two websites will be less effective than driving all of the traffic to one site, and that it could actually be detrimental overall.
What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Feel free to let me know if you need any more details.
-
There's another trap that I've seen people fall into, and that is not looking at the pages you're competing with in the search results.
If you look at the SERPS for your target term, are their any insights there?
- How competitive is it? Are there lots of ads? Are the pages that are ranking optimised/targeted to the search term?
- Do the competitors have a reputation/brand associated with this particular search term?
- Based on the pages being returned, can you establish the searchers intent? (Is this a navigational/transactional/informational query? What is the searchers level of awareness of this product/service?
- You mention local - for this term, is there a local intent? How localised as the search results for this term?
- What else apart from the authority of the page is helping the top ranking do so well for this keyword?
- What about related searches? Are their opportunities to target this term more broadly by building content around the questions subtopics related to this term?
-
Hi Doug,
Thanks for the feedback. Their reasoning for the new site was that the original site was never able to rank well for their main target search term (and similar variations), so they assumed that creating a site that is completely specific to that search term/service would help with ranking for that search term. I actually agree with that thinking, but there is a definite trade-off. It means time has to be taken away from optimization and up-keep of the original site to build up this brand new website, and I could also see a lot of issues with citations and local search discrepancies between the two sites as well.
I'm waiting on access to analytics and webmaster tools data for both sites, but will definitely use that information before making a final decision on which route to take. Data aside, there are A TON of improvements that can be made to the original site that will make a positive difference.
It's good to hear that your thinking is along the same lines as mine. Overall I'm leaning towards proposing that we stick with the original site and put our efforts towards building that up.
-
Hi Garrett,
I agree with you that using one authoritative domain is generally preferable than although there are valid reasons to create campaign specific micro-sites.
What makes the them think that a new site, with our any establish authority is going to perform better than the current site?
I think that as the new site has already been built the best thing to do is to collect some data and see how well it is currently performing (even if it's not as optimised as it could be). Is it out-performing your authoritative site? Can you get access to analytics/webmaster tools data for the two domains?
Can you establish why the authoritative site struggled to get any visibility for the main service? What are the strengths/weaknesses of their site compared to their competitors?
Sometimes, the pursuit of a "glory keyword" is a fools errand. Just because you can't rank for the high commercial intent keyword doesn't mean you can create content targeted at potential customers earlier in their awareness.
Can you provide resource content, or blog posts that enable your client to get in front of the conversation and build a relationship before people are ready to make a commitment and click that "contact-us or buy now" button?
Without knowing the sites concerned it's difficult to provide any specific insights.
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
-
SEO question
Hi there! I'm the SEO manager for 5 Star Loans. I have 2 city pages running. We are running our business in 2 locations: Berkeley, CA & San Jose, CA. For those offices we've created 2 google listings with separate gmail accounts. Berkeley (http://5starloans.com/berkeley/) ranks well in Berkeley in Gmaps and it shows on first page in organic results. However the second city page San Jose (http://5starloans.com/san-jose/) doesn't show in the Gmaps local pack results and also doesn't rank well in organic results. Both of them have authentic backlinks and reviews. It has been a year already and it's high time we knew the problem 🙂 any comment would be helpful. thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moonalev0 -
A new website issue
Hello everybody,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtmaster
I have started a new website 22 days ago at the beginning of this month and i have long articles. I think this should make the site appear in search results for long tail keywords even if they are not very relevant but as you can see in the attached image from my webmaster tools the impression count has suddenly increased to 100 then significantly decreased again. Even when i cancel "filter" option. Is this normal for a 3 weeks old website? or there is something i have to check? thanks. cLMa04l.jpg0 -
Wrong Website Showing Up On Knowledge Graph - Car Dealer SEO Question
Hi Everyone, I have a client who has two website platforms, one of them is mandated by the manufacturer and the other is the one we use and is linked up to our Google Plus/Maps/etc. accounts. The one that is manufacturer mandated is showing up on the Google Knowledge graph and this is not ideal for us. Unfortunately, we cannot get rid of the other site because it is mandated. So how do we go about fixing this issue? I Had a few ideas, and I'd like to know if they would work. If you can think of something that's outside of the box, I'd appreciate it. 1.) Put a rel=canonical across the website 2.) Remove all keywords that might trigger it to show up on the knowledge graph from the URL of the non ideal site 3.) Go for a .net or .us domain. Do these kind of domains have less authority and are less likely to show up in a google search? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
My website has disapeared from all google queries except the ones that contains it´s own website name
Hi, My website URL is: www.nixiweb.com Before June of 2013 my website was always shown at first or second place at google when searching for "hosting gratis". After June of 2013 my website has disappeared from all searches, it only appears when I search for the site name, eg: "nixiweb" or “www.nixiweb.com” At webmaster tools, the search queries table only shows queries related to my website name (eg: "nixiweb" or “xixiweb”), and none related to any other keyword. Can anybody help me understanding which is the problem with my site? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nixiweb0 -
Advanced SEO question.
Hi, I manage and do the SEO for this site: www.aerlawgroup.com. If you Google "Los Angeles Criminal Defense Attorney", you can see I rank well (1st page). I have managed to achieve similar rankings for interior pages within the site: www.aerlawgroup.com/domestic-violence.html (Google: "Los Angeles Domestic Violence Attorney".) Here is my question. No matter how hard I try, I cannot get to the first page on Google for the search term: "Los Angeles DUI Lawyer", for the following interior page: www.aerlawgroup.com/dui.html. Is there anyway that I can pass the authority/ranking (not sure what to call it) that I have for www.aerlawgroup.com to www.aerlawgroup.com/dui.html so that internal page ranks higher for "Los Angeles DUI Lawyer"? I apologize if my question doesn't make sense. In a nutshell, I'm trying to understand if there is anyway to use the ranking I have for www.aerlawgroup.com to help me rank higher for Los Angeles DUI lawyer for the dui interior page. If not, are there any other suggestions anyone has to achieve a higher ranking? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Robots.txt: Link Juice vs. Crawl Budget vs. Content 'Depth'
I run a quality vertical search engine. About 6 months ago we had a problem with our sitemaps, which resulted in most of our pages getting tossed out of Google's index. As part of the response, we put a bunch of robots.txt restrictions in place in our search results to prevent Google from crawling through pagination links and other parameter based variants of our results (sort order, etc). The idea was to 'preserve crawl budget' in order to speed the rate at which Google could get our millions of pages back in the index by focusing attention/resources on the right pages. The pages are back in the index now (and have been for a while), and the restrictions have stayed in place since that time. But, in doing a little SEOMoz reading this morning, I came to wonder whether that approach may now be harming us... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurus
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions Specifically, I'm concerned that a) we're blocking the flow of link juice and that b) by preventing Google from crawling the full depth of our search results (i.e. pages >1), we may be making our site wrongfully look 'thin'. With respect to b), we've been hit by Panda and have been implementing plenty of changes to improve engagement, eliminate inadvertently low quality pages, etc, but we have yet to find 'the fix'... Thoughts? Kurus0