I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
-
Hello.
I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help.
I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day.
We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks.
The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message.
I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves.
Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit?
Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one?
Any help and advice would be much appreciated.
Tom.
-
Hi Guys
Thank you all for your responses. It seems pretty definitive that I should go for the root domain option.
I do have one more thing to ask though. If I do switch the site back to the root domain, should I still keep the Kigu Kids domain going too? Considering it's already ranking in Google around number 7?
Tom.
-
Yep.... That surprised me too.
-
Agree with Egol; there's just so much synergy available here that I don't think any kind of SEO benefit from segmenting the sites would be worth it. It helps that the age of the micro-site/keyword stuffed domains seems to be behind us. I also disagree with the premise that kids are a different target market, because they rarely have credit cards and are shopping online unmonitored. I think segmenting would make sense if the categories and/or audiences were more diverse, but there are many commonalities here that I think would be better served by existing on the same site.
EDIT-Also I saw the clothes and... wow I guess that's a thing. I'm surprised the kids category didn't come >first<
-
My recommendation is to just use the root domain. Create a subfolder or category just for kids.
The link juice will stay the same and most importantly, your current customers are just customers and buyers. Unless you ranked keywords are like 'blah blah blah for adults' or anything related to being only for adults, your site should not limit itself to adults only.
Have a different section for kids within the root domain is VERY normal, its just growth. It is a great thing that you are able and willing to offer a kids section and this is good business.
Final thoughts: keep it within root domain, it is just better for business and can attract more awareness that "hey you offer kid costumes too!"
-
If I owned this business I would not have to think about this question very long at all.
I would build the kids products into the current site. There are many reasons why I would do this, and SEO is one of the lesser reasons.
With one site you can have fantastic cross selling. Mother visits the site looking for her own costume and decides to get the same costume for her kids.. Now you sold three of them instead of one. Same could happen the other way... mother looking for kids costume and decides to buy same for herself and maybe dad. Now you sold four costumes to one customer.
You know how much more profitable the large shopping cart sales are compared to small shopping cart sales.
Also, you only have one site to maintain, one product database, one hosting, one security certificate, lots of savings of money and time.
This is wayyyy stronger branding. Everybody talking about one great site instead of a couple small sites.
For SEO your current domain has great rankings and authority. I guarantee that new kids product pages added to this site will rank immediately better than same pages on a new site with zero authority.
For popularity... mom shows photo of kids costume on facebook or her blog.. this gives a link or a "like" and spreads the word. All of this attention is focused on ONE SITE not divided between two.
So, I say that you should DO THIS TODAY and stop spinning your wheels. You will be making a lot more money right away!
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
-
Can a linking Root Domain figure be in the millions?
Hi there! In SERP analysis for my chosen keywords, DA level for a facebook page is 97, and the RDs linking to root domain is 42,117,874. So does this site have 42 million domains leading back to this page, making it impossible to beat with SEO? Any help is appreciated as I'm struggling to understand what this means! Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kati_nav0 -
New site migration (multiple sites into one + new domain)
Hi, I have read so many very helpful guides and experiences from you guys that will greatly help me but I have a few questions please. Our company has 3 sites, the main site and 2 sites for different product ranges: BrandProductName.com (main site - DA = 22 raking well for product name) Productname2.com (DA = 10 ranking very well for product name and little competition) BrandProductName3.com (DA = 10 poor ranking) We wish to bring all the sites into one with categories for the 3 different product. The main site is an e-commerece site whereas the other 2 are not (currently). On top of this as the main domain has one of the product names in it they wish to change the domain to be just Brandname.com. So the plan is to combine site 2 and 3 into site 1 and change that domain name. As you can imagine this is going to be quite a job. I am fairly happy with the steps required (having read all the guides and migrated many sites in the past) but with the added domain name change this is a little daunting. So my questions are: Should I merge the 3 sites into 1 and then changed the domain at a later point? Should I change the domain of the main site first and then merge site 2 and 3 in later? Should I just do it all together? Or based on the data i have provided do you disagree with the plan, what would you recommend? We are not in a massive rush to complete all of this so we have the time to plan and execute this when we are fully ready. Any help / advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csimmo0 -
How to get a site out of Google's Sandbox
Hi I am working on a website that is ranking well in bing for the domain name / exact url search but appears no where in Google or Yahoo. I have done the site search in Google and it is indexed so I am presuming it is in the sandbox. The website was originally developed in India and I do not know whether it had some history of bad backlinks. The website itself is well optimised and I have checked all pages in Moz - getting a grade A. Webmaster Tools is not showing any manual actions - I was wondering what I could do next?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AllieMc0 -
Using pictures from another domain
We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer. Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server. There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues? will this generate Google penalties? Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it. We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters. How important is the file name for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
How does the crawl find duplicate pages that don't exist on the site?
It looks like I have a lot of duplicate pages which are essentially the same url with some extra ? parameters added eg: http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition?page=1 http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition?page=2 These extra 2 pages (and there's loads of pages this happens to) are a mystery to me. Not sure why they exist as there's only 1 page. Is this a massive issue? It's built on Drupal so I wonder if it auto generates these pages for some reason? Any help MUCH appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deniz0 -
Stop Google crawling a site at set times
Hi All I know I can use robots.txt to block Google from pages on my site but is there a way to stop Google crawling my site at set times of the day? Or to request that they crawl at other times? Thanks Sean
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ske110 -
Using a .de domain for non-german website. Sane?
Hi there guys(and girls), I bought a beautiful and clever .de domain, however I plan to use it for a brazillian website. Since GWT does not allow me to change the target location, and I am stuck with Germany on Google's eyes, I would like to know how bad would it be to stick with the .de domain? My content won't be international. It will focus only in portuguese(Brazil) content. Is there a way to make it work? I would really like to stick with this domain, but Google's organic traffic cannot be overlooked... Thanks in advance for all input I can get. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adepalma0 -
Approximate linking root domains we need based on these metrics
Our top 4 competitors for a single term we're targeting has the following metrics: PA 45, DA 89, 6 linking root domains to page, 40,000 linking root domains to domain PA 53, DA 100, 3 linking root domains to page, 1.6 million to domain PA 32 DA 37, 4 linking root domains to page, 200 to domain PA 55 DA 66, 6 linking root domains to page, 3300 to domain All other optimization is about the same, except in (2) they have half of the keyword phrase in the domain and the whole keyword phrase in the URL. Also everybody else has title and meta description with the plural form, and the singular is what I typed in. We have the whole keyword phrase in the domain. The above 4 sites were internal pages, ours is a home page rank. Our metrics: PA 33, DA 22, 30 linking root domains to page, 43 linking root domains to site How tough will it be for us to compete? How many strong linking root domains will it take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0