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
-
Why some domains and sub-domains have same DA, but some others don't?
Hi I noticed for some blog providers in my country, which provide a sub-domian address for their blogs. the sub-domain authority is exactly as the main domain. Whereas, for some other blog providers every subdomain has its different and lower authority. for example "ffff.blog.ir" and "blog.ir" both have domain authority of 60. It noteworthy to mention that the "ffff.blog.ir" does not even exist! This is while mihanblog.com and hfilm.mihanblog.com has diffrent page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 15, 2019, 7:27 PM | rayatarh5451230 -
Consolidating Multiple Domains into A Single Domain
I have a client who's website is an amalgamation of multiple domains. jacksonhole.net is the main domain but the site passes traffic back and forth from the following domains/sites. My questions is, would it it be better for SEO to consolidate all of these domains under the single high authority domain and 301 redirect the rest or is that a really bad idea? Thanks for your help. jacksonhole.net (Domain Authority 31) jackson-hole-rental-condos.com (Domain Authority 22) jackson-hole-rental-homes.com (Domain Authority 21) j acksonholehotelguide.com (Domain Authority 19)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 18, 2016, 1:26 PM | dbaxa-2613381 -
Is it safe to redirect our .nl (netherlands) domain that we have just purchased to our .com domain?
Hi all! We've recently developed a German version of our website with German translation and now we have just purchased a .nl domain, but with this one, we want all of the copy to remain in English. Is it ok to redirect our .nl domain to our current .com website or will this give us bad SEO points? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 3, 2013, 8:44 AM | donaldsze0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 16, 2013, 3:35 PM | BrandLabs0 -
Keep multiple domains or combine them?
I need some help figuring out if I should combine multiple domains or if I should let them be separate? I have domain1.com, domain2.com, and domain3.com. Well, domain1.com owns domain2.com and domain3.com. And currently domain1.com points to domain2.com and domain3.com from the homepage. They are going through some changes at their business, and now the option is on the table to combine the domains or still let them be separate as long as they link to each other. What is the best way to handle this and are there more things I should go through before making a decision? None of them have a ton of links to them, and they aren't super robust, but would just to have some advice. Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 24, 2013, 1:15 PM | Rocket.Fuel0 -
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 | Sep 19, 2012, 3:40 AM | SeoSheikh0 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 12, 2012, 12:59 PM | Colage0 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 11, 2011, 7:23 PM | pbhatt1