Three Sites or One?
-
I have a client who provides three distinct, although related, services. Some of his competitors only provide one of those services, and thus their sites are more saturated with that particular service. Would it be best to develop three different sites optimized for each particular service, or could I achieve the same effect by optimizing different sections of one site for each service?
-
I am a business owner and have multiple services. So I can give you my recommendation from my experience.
Maintaining multiple sites is a PITA. One problem is you have one company name but two websites for it, or if you do have a different company name for each, how will the phone be answered. Sure, you can get around that but there a many other inconveniences, like multiple business cards etc.. or with one physical location will only allow you one google-local entry.
The main page has a main h1 heading at the top listing the services ie "Epoxy Flooring, Concrete Resurfacing, Stone Restoration serving Delaware"
What I did is Summerize each of my services on my main page with h2 headers followed by a paragraph below the heading optimizing the text as best I could.
The h2 headers and paragraphs are formatted in 2 columns by 3 rows (6 services) on the main page as try to dilute any top to bottom bias.
What's very important is what EGOL said about cross services ie cross selling, Its much better to expose your customer to all your services.
-
Thanks all for the advice. I'm definitely recommending combining everything into one site. Right now he's got 2 sites, each focusing on different aspects/services that he provides. Any recommendations on how to effectively leverage the traffic he's already getting to the 2nd site (that I'll remove)?
Also, can anyone point me to examples of sites that have effectively optimized for multiple services on the same site?
To give a little more background, this client offers a number of related services, including doctor assisted weight loss and hormone therapy (among several others). Many of his competitors only deal with one of those services, so their sites are all about weight loss or hormone therapy. My client's concern is that a potential patient will come to his site for, say weight loss, and be turned away because it's lost among all of the other services, while his competitors are clearly all about simply weight loss.
As EGOL noted below, this client thrives on cross-selling his services, and in my mind one of his main selling points is that he is a one-stop-shop for multiple, related services.
-
I have a similar situation with a client. She's got one site right now and she wants me to create a second one. It's mostly because she found a domain name that she's in love with. But, I know that one site is going to be a lot easier to promote than two. Her two ideas for sites are very closely connected.
I think I've finally convinced her to stick with one site but have a section of that main site totally dedicated to her new idea.
This way, any links that come to either section will benefit the site as a whole.
-
If this is one client, unless they are separate business entities, hands down it should be one site. It's A LOT easier to SEO one site than it is three, and your work is going to pay off a lot more as well.
-
I agree with Sheldon, especially if there are cross-selling opportunities between the related services.
-
Hi, Kevin-
Without knowing a little more about the niche and the services, it's difficult to give a definitive answer. But I think that in most instances, I would be inclined to simply concentrate on fleshing out the pages that deal with each individual service, all contained within one site. In that fashion, I think you'll gain more authority to the site, while still focusing on each service as needed.
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
-
Optimising for multi sites selling same products
Hi Everyone I work for a company that sell aluminium joinery under 3 brands which are, ostensibly, competitors. With regards to optimising the websites, for keywords, should I be trying to optimise them for the same keywords, or should I use different keyword variations of each?
On-Page Optimization | | APLNZ110 -
Problem with getting a site to rank at all
We pushed this Word Press site live about a month ago www.primedraftarchitecture.com. Since then we've been adding regular content, blog posts 3 times a week with social posts on facebook, twitter, G+ and LinkedIn. We also submitted via Moz Local about 3 weeks ago. Yext about two weeks ago and have been adding about 5 listings to small local directories a week. Webmaster tools shows that the site map is valid and the pages of the site are getting indexed and it shows links from 7 sites, mostly directories. I'm just not seeing the site ranking for anything. We're getting zero organic traffic. I though we did a good job not over optimizing the pages. I'm just stymied trying to figure out what's wrong. Usually we push a site live and see at least some low rankings after just a couple of weeks. Can anyone see anything that looks bad or where we've gone wrong?
On-Page Optimization | | DonaldS0 -
Flickr v. On-Site Images
My apologies in that I have searched for this, have seen discussions on it and haven't seen a definitive answer on the question of hosting & displaying on-domain images v. using a source like flickr to host all of your images. I have a client that is mostly a local search play in a very tourism heavy area. I'm investigating this option for a few reasons. 1. Ease of use. The new flickr app is brilliant. So if he's out giving a tour, takes a picture, it can be seamlessly integrated to his account & then shot off to all of his portals (website, facebook, twitter, etc.). It's a small client & he's not tech savvy, so this option suits him very well. 2. SEO. With all of the tagging, geo components, and it playing nice with Google Images search, I thought this was a viable option in hosting the majority of his on-site images. I've seen opinions on this before. But I was wondering if there any further opinions on the subject. Not sure if there's anything 'definitive', but any help or insight would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | BrianWhitaker0 -
How do I PERMANENTLY change an incorrect URL link with one of my keywords?
Hello, I received an “F” grade on my on-page report for one of my keywords. I noticed that the URL linked with that keyword was wrong. After changing it to the correct URL, I received an “A.” However, the change was not permanent. How do I permanently change the URL? I don’t see any “Save Changes” or “Apply Changes” button anywhere. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | jampaper0 -
Do Blog Comments On Your Site Help SEO?
There is a lot of debate as whether or not having comments on your blog is helpful from an SEO perspective. Proponents believe that more comments (1) creates more content, which search engines love, (2) creates more relevant keywords that can be searched, and (3) helps with "freshness" of the site/content leading to greater site authority. Others like Joost de Valk believe that comments can actually hurt SEO because keyword density cannot be controlled. He argues that his top SEO content are pages not posts for this very reason. What is your opinion?
On-Page Optimization | | marcperry0 -
Yesterday our site had a page rank of 5, today not ranked.
All pages on our site as of today are showing current page is not ranked by google, we have been page rank 5 for about 4 years now, we still seem to be showing in google searches. Anyone have any ideas as to why?
On-Page Optimization | | wcuk0 -
Should our social network put all of our member profiles in the site map?
We're working on some changes to our site and want to add a site map file to give some hints to search engines on our member profiles. Our site has millions of member profiles. I want to ensure that Google indexes them. Is there a benefit to submitting millions of profiles across multiple site maps? Is it better to pick a sample of those and submit them? Most member profiles have links to other member profiles. Is there any benefit to taking a single site map of 50k links and then changing it at some frequency so that all of the member profiles are eventually indexed? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | JoeCotellese810 -
Does targeting more than one keyword or keyword phrase effect rankings?
Hi, We have a homepage where we are targeting three main keywords. 'Cheap books', 'buy books' and 'used books'. We are ranking well for cheap books and making progress on the more competitive buy and used. My question is how many keywords can you reasonably rank for on one page. We are targeting other keywords on other pages and having some success - but is three the maximum or is that too many?
On-Page Optimization | | Benj251