One Site vs. Many
-
This is a question that I am not sure has a "right" answer. I am just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on this. I can see benefit of both sides of the coin.
In your opinion, is it better to have one large e-commerce site with all of your content on the same domain or is it better to have multiple more targeted domains with your content broken up into smaller chunks?
The reason I ask is, I feel like while multiple more targeted sites certainly have the benefit of focus, aren't you taking all your traffic and content, splitting it up and leaving you with several sites that most likely are getting less traffic than one large site would.
All opinions welcome.
-
Sure, you can absolutely create brand pages and from there branch to product pages. A bigger site is more effective and easier to maintain and promote and analyze than multiple small sites.
-
Ok, we are a vitamin and supplement company.. so all of our products fit within that scope. We have a couple of additional sites for more in depth weight loss programs (our best selling products) that we sell the supporting supplements for on our main site. These additional sites are branded for those programs and have lots of supporting content blogs, recipes, etc.
I suppose we could create some heavily branded areas in our main site specific to those products and build all of that out further. We are in a highly competitive market so any ground we can gain is helpful. Also, we are a smaller company in comparison to many of our competitors, so my fear is that splitting all of our content into these different sites could put us at a disadvantage.
Thanks for the advice so far, still not sure what route to take... but appreciate you taking the time to respond.
-
One site if all somewhat related, several sites if completely different. You don't want shoes, car parts and landscaping on one site. You do want car parts, van parts and motorcycle parts on one site. The single site will be stronger than several smaller stand alone sites.
-
One Site To Rule Them All
*sorry, I had too, lol
-
That makes sense. In that case, I would analyze the competition level for your "money" keywords and topics and see if it makes sense to split them up. You would also need to think about if there is enough content to write about, and constantly feed for the highly localized kind of site.
It has been my experience that an entire site whose content is wholly focused on one topic will rank better generally speaking than a larger site with a broader base of topics (for that keyword and topic). This is good and bad because you will only be able to use the 1 site for about 1 topic.
The competition level will play a large factor in the decision IMO. That would be the next thing I would look at.
-
Thanks for the response.
Well, from an administration perspective, we have multiple sites already... so I certainly know the challenges and amount of time that can take. I personally am leaning toward having only one site, but am looking for some reasons why one strategy may be better than the other. I was wondering more from an SEO perspective since the administrative complexity would only be simplified with one site.
I also agree, any answers I get will probably be sweeping generalizations without knowing all the specifics of our business, and analytics.. so I am taking that into account.
-
IMO, one site is enough to manage all by itself.
Having multiple sites, just from an administration perspective is very challenging in particular when you go over a certain amount. You would have to have full time admins just to manage the sites, let alone the content of each site.
You would have to add up how much expense you have per unit of site versus how much net revenue (profit) you have directly from that site. I think in a lot of cases the expenses per site are going to exceed the profits, but before making a sweeping generalization, do a study and make your best guesses before investing in the infrastructure, IT and employees.
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
-
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Is it posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?
Hi everyone, i´ll try to explain a situation is happening to me, i´m goint to try to explain the case (im writing the sites without links for explication purposes. Site 1: Adventurerooms Site 2: Adventureroomsmallorca Site 3: Adventureroomsmadrid (the new site) What happen is that at first there was only Adventurerooms and Adventureroomsmallorca, Adventurerooms was for Madrid and linked to the one in Mallorca too, was kind of giving the information for Madrid but in first page split with a link to Mallorca. In a new strategy we create Adventureroomsmadrid for Madrid, and leave Adventurerooms for Spain (with links to Adventureroomsmadrid and Adventureroomsmallorca. We redirect the info for Madrid in Adventurerooms to Adventureroomsmadrid with 301 redirections. We work during this 3 months in Adventureroomsmadrid making content in the blog, and improving (now Adventureroomsmadrid is Moz 15 (perhaps even more), and Adventurerooms is Moz 10. Surprising Adventurerooms is getting better in its search rankings, even when we took away content from it and even without working well. Adventureroomsmadrid is also improving but not as much as Adventurerooms (i know that is a new site, only 3 months), but Adventurerooms gets better results with no content and only DA of 10. I hope i´ve explain the case with my english so the question is: "Is it posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?" Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webtematica0 -
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
SEO - is it site or page
Hi When we're talking about SEO does the search engine only look at the whole site in general or do they look at the individual page when we're talking about SERP? So if you have a keyword "my search term" Does the search engine look at the site first or the page with the term on then rank you or is it the page then the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Unique domains vs. single domain for UGC sites?
Working on a client project - a UGC community that has a DTC model as well as a white label model. Is it categorically better to have them all under the same domain? Trying to figure which is better: XXX,XXX pages on one site vs. A smaller XXX,XXX pages on one site and XX,XXX pages on 10-20 other sites all pointing to the primary site. The thinking on the second was that those domains would likely achieve high DA as well as the primary, and would passing their value to the primary. Thoughts? Any other considerations we should be thinking about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intentionally0 -
Any SEO suggestions for my site?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Does anyone have any suggestions for any on-site SEO that would benefit my website? Any recommendations, big or small are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor1 -
Site comparison - what is wrong with me?
www.bcspeakers.com/ vs www.psbspeakers.com/ with the search term "speakers" why does BC speakers show up in around #50-60 and PSB is not in the top #1000? From all metrics on seomoz PSB kicks BC in every area by a large margine! can anyone see why BC is listed for that keyword and PSB is not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevin48030