Time to Separate Company Websites or Keep it on One Domain?

[rminerals]

Hey Everyone!

I am completely stumped with what I should do for the scenario I find myself in… I’m hoping with your experience, you could guide me into the right direction.

Let’s say our current website is Brown.com (Brown Group Inc.). We have a splash page, which links to two subfolders Brown Minerals (Brown.com/Minerals) and Brown Pet Products (Brown.com/Pet). Both of these are separate companies but owned by Brown Group Inc. Each company specializes in different industries, sell different products, have different customers and have different marketing. The only common thing the two companies have is the brand name “Brown” and owned by the same person.

Brown Group Inc.
(Brown.com)

Brown Minerals
(Brown.com/Minerals)

Brown Pet Products
(Brown.com/Pet)

I work specifically for Brown Minerals. It is my job to develop a new website, build traffic to our website, improve our SEO rankings and to build the Brown Minerals online brand. I am afraid that the work I will be putting into building our online brand may not be as effective since we share the same domain name with Brown Pet Products, which their website is outdated, they have their own traffic, links, etc. specifically for their products & industry.

My question is, should we keep both websites in subfolders on the existing domain name or should we separate the websites and put them on their own domain names (BrownMinerals.com and BrownPetProducts.com)?

Thank you

[rminerals]

Hi Christy,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Great feedback and recommendation to pursue building out each company website with it's own domain. Thank you!

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, thanks for your question! As the companies otherwise operate independently and it doesn't make sense to to cross-market the products under an umbrella brand, I would build out each company's website on its own domain.