Should I set up multiple websites with keywords in the domain?

[dstepchew]

I work for an e-commerce brand that manufactures sells 2-3 uniform products for medical professionals. Of course, we set out originally using our brand name as our domain name, and we will continue down that path. However, our best products are the premium lab coats we sell, and we're currently facing an uphill battle for the keyword combo, "lab coats" which is 44% competitive. In our ranking analysis, we can see that we're up against 2 major competitive forces: extremely high domain authority (i.e. Amazon & Ebay), and stores that have the phrase "lab coats" or the word "lab" in their domain name. We recently dropped the hosting package we had with the domain www.scrubsandlabcoats.net (which was redirecting to our primary domain) and our ranking dropped almost immediately afterwards. We put that site back up and now 301 redirect it to our main site but it doesn't look like we restored whatever it was that was in place on that site (before my time) because our rankings haven't improved back to where they were a few months ago. Question is: Would it make sense to purchase a domain with the combination of our brand name and the words "lab coats" and then put up a few pages with links to our top productus OR would that be no more effective than what we already have in place (www.ourdomain.com/lab-coats.html)? Also, any guesses on what kind of crazy set up we used to have on that other domain (scrubsandlabcoats.net) that was helping us in the past? Really appreciate the help!

[BM7]

Yes, I assume they add that so it doesn't become duplicate content or get indexed by Google.

[dstepchew]

Good call.  Do you know if archive.org adds a "noindex, nofollow" to the page source?  Thanks.

[BM7]

I see your old page is on index at archive.org (6 copies from various times in 2011,2010)

see http://web.archive.org/web/20110129191605/http://www.scrubsandlabcoats.net/home.html

You can go back and see what they were doing. Do a 'Page Source' and copy it for analysis.

[Sean_Dawes]

You can easily compete for rankings against amazon and ebay. I personally would just keep the one domain and rank it for all the terms you are looking for. Just need an effective onsite and offsite SEO plan.