Two websites vs. one for SEO

[garrettkite]

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.

[DougRoberts]

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?

[garrettkite]

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.

[DougRoberts]

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.