Creating a new site for each department of your business. Thoughts?
-
What is everyone's thoughts on creating several websites for your business for each department.
For example.. say you owned a car dealership.
You create a different site for:
- New cars for sale
- Used cars for sale
- Service department -mechanical repairs
- Parts & accessories department
- Financing department
Positives:
Having separate sites for each department would probably make it easier to rank on the specific search terms. Since a whole site on one topic Ie. Used cars would rank over just a page with the same information on a dealership website.
Negatives:
- You would have to maintain 5 sites
- Link building
- Social Media
- Analytics
- ETC.
- Since they are all new domains & sites it will take longer for each site to rank.
- Google will see them as small lower authority sites since they are only a few pages & not larger sites.
What is everyone's thoughts on this? Would you create several small sites? Or would you continue working on one big main authority site & continue link earning to the specific department pages, blogging on the topics etc.
Thanks for any help & opinions!
-
I would not. Just build different sections of the site. An example of this would be an effective online retail store in automotive which has numerous makes/models under one roof. It can be done effectively, you just need to build out a good wireframe.
-
The brand is what I would focus on; opposed to trying to deal with that many sites under a single industry umbrella.
The2 big things in your negatives (Link Building, Social Media) for 5 sites is enough to deter me from thinking any further about it. Then again I'm a tad old school, I would much rather focus on delivering an exciting user experience that users like so much they talk about it. Today that impacts Social Media, before the bird and book, it generated links via forums, emails, and blogs.
My thoughts,
Don
-
It looks like you have laid out all of the positives and negatives very well. You seem to have a good understanding of SEO and of what each plan requires.
A few years ago, the several website model for one business was a widely used SEO tactic, but in my opinion it is not as strong as it used to be. Since exact match domains are not as effective any more and link quality is so important, I would recommend one website.
Also, the search terms you want to show up for are most likely competitve. You can not just build a website with good title tags and header tags and expect to show up. You will need great links for each website.
My advice would be to build one website, but create a separate link building plan for each department. When you build a link for a certain department link to that department's subpage. This will build your domain authority while also giving your website more value because of the deep inbound links.
Also, in my opinion, you will build a stronger brand with one website.
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
-
Redirecting an Entire Site to a Page on Another Site?
So I have a site that I want to shut down http://vowrenewalsmaui.com and redirect to a dedicated Vow Renewals page I am making on this site here: https://simplemauiwedding.net. My main question is: I don't want to lose all the authority of the pages and if I just redirect the site using my domain registrar's 301 redirect it will only redirect the main URL not all of the supporting pages, to my knowledge. How do I not lose all the authority of the supporting pages and still shut down the site and close down my site builder? I know if I leave the site up I can redirect all of the individual pages to corresponding pages on the other site, but I want to be done with it. Just trying to figure out if there is a better way than I know of. The domain is hosted through GoDaddy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Client rebranded with a new website but can't migrate now defunct franchise website to new website.
Hi everyone, My client is a chain of franchised restaurants with a local domain website named after the franchise. The franchise exited the market while the client stayed and built its own brand with a separate website. The franchise website (which is extremely popular) will be shut down soon but the client will not be able to redirect the franchise website to the new website for legal reasons. What can I do to ensure that we start ranking immediately for the franchise keyphrase as soon as the franchise website is shutdown. We currently have the new website and access to the old website (which we can't redirect) Thanks, T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tarek_Lel0 -
How to jumpstart the new parent company site?
A client operates four well known brands inside the industry, and each website has a relatively (for the industry) high amount of Domain authority across these four sites. They just formed a group of these four brands and launched a new website with no authority. What steps would you take to instantly grow the authority of the new site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Socialrocketco1 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Will an RSS feed help new product get indexed? How to create one for product?
Hi I've read that creating an RSS feed for one of our ecommerce sites will help the products get indexed faster. Currently it takes google 4-5 days to index our new products, we want to speed that up. Will an RSS feed of the new products we have help? How do you create an RSS feed for this? Our blog gets indexed within minutes, but our main website, 4 days. Help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
New feature on SERPs
I noticed something new on Google's SERPs today. Has this been up for a while? Has anyone else seen this. https://www.google.com/search?q=bubba+watson+wife&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a gm8rI.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Questions about turning my wordpress site into an ecommerce site. Experience needed.
I have a wordpress site that is about a product that is now getting some great traffic. Right now It has affiliate stuff on it. I want to sell my own product so I will be turning this wordpress site into an ecommerce site. I want to redesign it so I am not looking for simple plugins to just add a cart. The part I am really confused about is what to do with my posts and categories? How does that work when turning this site into an ecommerce site? Lets say the site is "hats for adults" My post pages are things like "funny hats for adults", "hats for adult men" etc etc. Would I turn these posts pages into like category pages that have a category of products. Or should I create real categories and have my developer turn those into the ecommerce category pages and then redirect my posts to those categories? Maybe I don't even know what I am talking about. Is this even making sense? This is a small site (5posts and 1 category) and most of the traffic will come from the homepage keywords anyways.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0