One company, two audiences. Ok to make two sites?
-
I have researched and researched on this question, and I'm still not satisfied. Most of the answers on the Moz forum and otherwise are all from 2013, as well. So, I thought I'd bring it up again.
I have two distinct audiences for a real estate business I'm working with (very different needs and interests):
- Farm Buyers
- Residential Buyers
My client is wanting to expand their presence in the farm market. Their main competitor is ranking for, more or less, an exact domain name match. They want to spin up a site focused only on farm buyers. Here are the pros/cons in my mind of creating a separate site:
- Pros: Reaching/targeting a specific audience (better user experience), having domain name with keywords (I won't keyword stuff...promise), a site completely devoted to content regarding farms, a blog completely devoted to farms (we have a content strategy in place)
- Cons: NAP issues (same address), splitting up domain authority, a bit of brand confusion (though the same logo/brand will be on both sites)
In my mind, the pros outweigh the cons. Any ideas on how to address the cons? I could just not include address and phone, but that seems ridiculous...catering to the bots and not the user.
Thanks, everyone!
Gabe -
Hey Gabe,
Great topic, and those competitors with EMDs outranking one are seriously aggravating. You've done a really good job of brainstorming the pros and cons. Pretty much 100% of the time, I advocate for a single site approach. The potential for brand building, authority building, ease of management and protection from the ever-changing whims of Google's filters make this the smart choice. Some things to ask the client, which I'm going to pretend is called R&B Realty:
-
Won't it be easier for you to build awareness of R&B serving all realty needs, than to expect consumers to somehow remember that they should go to rbfarmrealestate.com or rbhomesforsale.com? Don't you just want them to think of RBrealty.com for all of their needs?
-
Is there anything about the present domain that is ruling out building awesome farm-related content? For example is the domain something like homesforsalechicago.com right now? If so, could it be that you do need to purchase a new domain, but that it needs to be a branded domain that can encompass all present and future services? Imagine if in future R&B wants to expand to commercial real estate or luxury real estate. Would they then need 4 domains? That's a rabbit hole you don't want to go down.
-
Are you ready to invest? Provided that the current domain isn't making it somehow impossible to believe one could buy farm real estate from the company, I would present the company with a plan for creating the best possible section on the website for farm real estate. I would consistently publish best-in-class articles on this topic until I'd convinced Google that farm real estate is part-and-parcel of my brand, just as much as residential real estate is. I would be sure this content was highlighted from the homepage onward, and was built with good UX and good CTAs in mind. I'd invest a great deal in this, and make my pages rank highly for core terms. I'd also consider offsite marketing initiatives (both online and off) that would begin to build awareness of my brand's association with farm properties. I see far more opportunities than limits with this approach, and with the right plan, you should have no problem creating a sterling strategy for the client.
Hope these thoughts are helpful!
-
-
Tough question! I'll try to touch on a couple of your pros / cons.
1- A domain name rich in keywords isn't nearly as important as it used to be. If you were reading old articles (from before 2013, which those may have referenced), this might have misled you a bit.
2- Similar to less domain authority (as each will need to grow their own backlinks), each site will also have less direct traffic- which is a strong ranking factor that shouldn't be overlooked. It's VERY difficult for low-traffic sites to gain traction on competitive organic keywords.My instinct is to make a branch of the original site devoted to the other audience. Nothing precludes that portion of the site from having its own blog and being a go-to resource for that audience. When you begin ranking on the organic keywords, they should end up in that portion of the site anyway.
If you were pricing/rebranding the same products differently for another audience that may change things, but I don't think that your list of "Pros" as is outweigh the "Cons." Of course, do more research and hopefully others will chime in too. Best of luck!
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
-
Local Site stuck on page 2 for years. Can’t penetrate page 1! Help!
Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I've ever asked a question here so please forgive if I slip up on any etiquette. I manage a website for a small Orlando Florida family law and divorce law firm who are targeting search phrases that include those "Orlando divorce attorney" variants. The site is located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/ If you run a search for "Orlando divorce attorney" along with close variant search terms our law firm website for about the past two years has hovered at the top of the second page of google but has never actually penetrated page 1. When you examine metrics such as page authority, domain authority, trust, and other traditional metrics it tells you that our site should be on page 1 but alas it's not happening. We have, however been featured quite often in the three pack for the local listings for the target search terms. Though valuable, our goal has always been to be featured in the top three of the organic search results. To add to the confusion we have a practice area page located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/orlando-divorce-lawyer/ dedicated to divorce and expected that page to rank for these divorce attorney search terms but it will not rank for the search terms and instead our homepage ranks for them every single time regardless of how we swap around the optimization on the page. Never had any manual actions. any help you guys can offer is greatly appreciated and I really appreciate your time!
Local SEO | | Seanthewood1230 -
Keyword rich domain names -> Point to sales funnel sites or to landing pages on primary domain?
Hey everyone,
Local SEO | | Transpera
We have a tonne of old domains we have done nothing with. All of them are keyword-rich domains.
Things like "[City]SEOPro" or "[City]DigitalMarketing" where [city] is a city that we are already targeting services in. So all of these domains will be targeted for local cities as keywords. We have been having an internal debate about whether or not we should just host sales funnel pages on these domains, that are rich in keywords and content......... ... Or ... ... Should we point these domains to landing pages on our existing domain that are basically the same as what we would do with the sales funnel pages, but are on our primary site? (keyword rich, with good and plentiful content) Then, as a follow-up question... Should these be set as just 301 redirects on these domains to our actual primary domain so the browser sees the landing page domain instead of the actual keyword-rich domain? ( [city]seopro.com ) Thanks guys. I know for some, the response will be an obvious one. However; we have probably way over thought this and have arguments for almost every scenario. We think we have an answer but wanted to send this out to the community first. I won't post what we are thinking yet, so that the answers can remain unbiased for now and we can have a conversation without it being swayed any one way. We understand that 301 redirects would be seen as a doorway page.
We are also only discussing in the context of organic search only.
If we ran the domains as their own sites, they would be about 3 pages of content only. Pretty static, but good content. Think of a PAS style sales funnel. Problem -> Acknowledgement -> Solution.0 -
Weather providers in search results - any idea how to become one?
Hi, as google are displaying more and more weather forecasts within results, we'd like to explore whether there's a possibility of exposing our api to google to allow them to use us as one of the providers for the data. At the moment it appears they use weather.com, weather underground and maybe also accuweather (although I've not seen them mentioned for a while on there), but I'm not sure if this is some sort of commercial agreement, or whether it's simply that google have been given access to the api's from those providers in return for the link in the weather panel in the search results. Does anyone have any information about this sort of thing (I assume weather isn't unique in this respect), or know of any way to contact google and find out at all please? Thanks
Local SEO | | PaulM01
Paul0 -
To Keep My Company's CO.UK Page Or Redirect It...
Hi Moz'ers - I have a question... Just to set the stage, we're a small recruiting firm, with an even smaller marketing department. I'm essentially a one man wrecking crew and don't have a ton of extra time. That being said, I know that page rank (and local office rank) are critical to our inbound lead generation, so I'm willing to invest some of my time into doing it right. The issue I'm having is ranking high as a local business in Austin, New York, San Francisco, and London, UK (to name a few). So far I've solved this through building dedicated subpages on our .com site and link building key word anchor text towards those pages. The only page that's not really gaining traction is our London page. So I decided to clone (most of) the site, tweak the text (to try and avoid dup text), and try and get that page to rank. I'm also having it hosted on a local server, have it using a local domain address suffix (co.uk), using local hreflang (on our .com site), created dedicated web 2.0 sites, and done my best to do some link building. The problem I'm facing is crapy local ranking, and limited bandwidth to maintain two sites. Should I: A) Scrap the co.uk site and focus on the .com (and subpages)
Local SEO | | bettsrecruiting
B) Keep the co.uk domain, and just redirect the URL to our .com page
C) Keep the co.uk domain, send all links from the home page to the relevant page on our .com page, and set up 301 redirects for all other relevant pages.
D) Hire someone to clean up, rewrite, and upkeep the co.uk site because it has the most SEO value in the long run and is the only way I'm going to be able to rank locally in London. What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance! Tim Our European Site - http://bettsrecruiting.co.uk/
Our US Site - http://bettsrecruiting.com/0 -
Separating facebook pages for 2 separate but similar companies
I am currently working with a payroll company that has two separate businesses. Payroll services and Time and Attendance services. Currently the client has 1 facebook page with about 50 likes that caters for both companies. My question is.... Should I separate the payroll and time and attendance companies and create 2 separate facebook pages, or since the businesses are so close together, we could use the one page to promote both businesses. We also have a similar issue with LinkedIn company pages. What do you guys think? Separate pages or combine pages? Currently there are 2 separate websites for each companies services.
Local SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Does the physical location of a server effect the local rankings of a site?
I've just been running a report on a site and noticed that while they have a .co.uk domain it is hosted on a server in the United States and just wondered if anyone was aware, if the physical location of a server mattered to search engines for ranking purposes especially with local search?
Local SEO | | ben_dpp0 -
What happens with SEO when a site is served via CloudFlare CDN?
Hello, With regards to hosting, it is my understanding that one of the search engine ranking factors for a particular geographic location (city/country) is where a site is hosted physically geographically. For example, if a site was developed for New York users primarily AND it was hosted on a server physically located within New York (IP address) then it would rank better in New York ... that is, given all other SEO ranking factors were equal? Is this true? My worry is that once a site is served via CloudFlare via their 64 global cached locations, then do the search engines effectively lose all context as to its origin hosting and therefore hosting in New York (in the example above) would have no different effect than if the site was hosted on Mars (after the site had been cached, that is). Many thanks,
Local SEO | | uworlds
Mark 🙂0 -
I'm starting an internet marketing company along with a newspaper company
I'm starting a project for a newspaper company where I just started working as the in-house SEO. I'll have ownership along with the newspaper for this new internet marketing company and could use some advice.Should I build our new site on the newspapers domain with good pr already or start a fresh site from square one. I'm trying to weigh out the pro's and cons and I'm still undecided.This news company has been around since the 50's and the trust is there. But just one sticky situation with an uneducated client could hurt the reputation of the newspaper.Your thoughts please!
Local SEO | | onetwotree0