Should I Combine 30 websites into one?
-
I have a Private health care company that I have just begun consulting for. Currently in addition to the main website serving the whole group, 30 individual sites which are for each of the hospitals in their group. Each has it's own domain.
Each site, has practically identical content: something that will be addressed in my initial audits. But should I suggest that they combine all the sites into one domain, providing individual category pages for each hosptial, or am I really going to suggest that each of the 30 sites, create unique content of their own.
This means thirty pages of content on "hip replacements" thirty different versions of "our treatement" etc, and bearing in mind they all run off the same CMS, even with different body text, the pages are going to be practically identical. It's a big call either way!
The reason they started out with all these sites, is that each hospital is it's own cost centre and whilst the web development team is a centralized resource. They each have their own sites to try and rank indivdually for local searches, naturally as they will each tend to get customers from their own local area.
Not every hospital provides the full range of treatments.
-
If the local hospitals are to have their own sites then I believe that an important part of those websites is the profiles of important physicians who serve there and the services that they deliver. These physicians and service staffs are the intellectual assets of each hospital. Their personalities and expertise these professionals are really what is being sold and thus what is marketable.
Patients really don't want a "hospital" they really want a medical team that can make them well.
In the small communities where I have lived anyone searching Google for a physician by name will very frequently encounter the large database publishing sites rather than the website of that physician's practice or the institution where he/she serves.
These database sites rank well because they have professional SEO yet some of them are close to professional spam.
That does not serve the searcher well at all, they don't need his/her name and address. Instead what they would hope to find is a page about this person and learn about his/her education, experience, expertise and personality - along with the connection to the hospital where service is rendered. If people are doing comparison shopping for a physician this is the information that they need to find.
-
Big conversations to be had this week it seems!
I think you've got it right there - deep content centralised and very sales oriented hospital sites which will rank well simply off the back of their hubs high authority.
The individual hospitals are kept independent as the central organisation is very hands off in telling them how to run things. Putting a sales "hat" on for a moment, I can see the opportunity to offer a complete new web site design to each of the hospitals too in that way.
Think I'm concerned that I don't have the silver bullet answer but as you say, it's going to be about understanding their philosophy and what they're hoping to achieve long term.
-
I agree with Theo. Merging the sites into one would clearly be the way to go based on your statement there is not enough unique content to support 30 sites.
Merge 30 sites into 1
If you merge all the sites together, I would recommend a single page focused on "hip replacements", and then a unique page for each local hospital focusing local SEO with terms such as "Manchester hip replacement".
You have the benefit of the current setup being decentralized presently. This should give you tremendous resources for contents. 30 different locations, each with their own departments. If you need content on hip replacement or any other topic for the main site, I would think the doctors and other staff would be willing to contribute or at least review your work. Anytime you need content it seems you could pick up the phone and have an overflowing well of information. I am quite jealous!
-
But should I suggest that they combine all the sites into one domain, providing individual category pages for each hosptial, or am I really going to suggest that each of the 30 sites, create unique content of their own.
I think that you should tell them the advantages and disadvantages of each of these two options.
Every answer has two sides. The SEO perspective and the business perspective. Maybe there are good reasons why they want each hospital to own a website to have its own identity. Some large companies want the individual hospitals to each have a very strong brand. Others want the main company to be the brand and the hospitals to be its points of local service. One of those profiles would want a single big site the other would want individual hospital sites.
I think that you need to gain an understanding of the client's philosophy.
There is another option... and that option is to have very deep and broad content on the main site with referral links out to appropriate hospitals. You also have the incomplete overlap of medical procedures with the geographic area served by these hospitals.
From a patient's perspective I could imagine these hospitals competing with one another for my business. If I need a knee replacement I might want to go to the closest or I might want to go to "the best". Are these hospitals so geographically close to one another that they are competitors?
I think that this is a good example of an SEO job where an understanding of the client is very important.
-
What you say is right for sure. It's my biggest concern about the uniqueness. But bare in mind, it's not just the hospitals but the treatments themselves we want to rank for local search. So we'd still need a page to rank for "breast enhancement in Liverpool" as well as "breast enhancement in Manchester" (I've not done the KW research yet mind)
The other (and nothing to do with SEO I know) thing is, its the difference between having 30 clients (as each hospital is it's own business cell paying for the SEO) and one client (if we told them to manage one site from head office) This is a huge company so budget isn't a massive concern for them.
My instincts are to have one site as you say but I'm not sure how we'd get round the problem any which way. Thankfully I'm not having to write any copy on this one! We've done all our quotes (and they've signed up) based on the separate site approach - but it's hit me like a smack in the face that this might not be the right approach.
I'll add onto this, to give some idea of the process that we're going through, that we're trialling this SEO on just 5 sites to start. This company were hoodwinked into SEO before which was just some BS link building service (low quality - waste of money) hence the trial. Classic snake oil stuff.
Their sites are a mess - every mistake possible has been made so it's a massive open goal for us as to hitting some big results on traffic uplift. If we meet their criteria for success (which we will) our service will be rolled out to the remaining hospitals but with them as individual clients.
-
Tough call.
I think the main point is how well these websites can manage to become unique, useful (and link worthy) on their own. Having to maintain 30 websites, of which neither one really has unique content, is both a burden their developers, editors and finances as it is virtually worthless to visitors.
The ranking for local searches could be handled via a sub folder structure, where each 'branch' has their own sub website such as www.example.org/new-york and www.example.org/orlando which could be optimized for that given city. Having the (future) authority of the main domain behind it, ranking may actually be easier for those sub sites than it is now for the actual separated websites with thin content and (presumably just as thin) link profiles.
Conclusion based on the information available: merge.
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
-
Two A Records or one CNAME and one A Record for www / naked domain?
What's the best way to point a domain to an IP address? Two A records one with host @ and the other with host www ? One A record pointing to the naked domain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aj613
One CNAME record with host www pointing to nakeddomain.com Something else? Thanks so much! This seems so basic, but always seems to stump me. I'm using WordPress, if it makes difference.0 -
Single topic website or as part of a multiple topic website?
I have content sitting on a site here - https://www.pfizerpro.co.uk/product/xeljanz/rheumatoid-arthritis - domain authority 25 page authority 18 - the pages went live three months ago and the website was launched 18 months. We now have the option to use a brand new domain www.xeljanz.co.uk Which is the better option to stick with the www.pfizerpro.co.uk as it is a larger multiple topic site that should attract more links or to start a new single topic site which google may view as the better source as it is dedicated to the topic? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kate_team_DM0 -
Advice for structuring hotel website
Hey guys, I am currently setting up a hotel booking website and I'm not so sure how to structure it. I have landing pages for: 1. Cities
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | baresound
2. Sights
3. States The main keywords are mainly "Hotels in Cityname" or "Hotels near Sightname". What would be the best SEO friendly way of structuring the url? https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cities/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sights/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/states/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-statename Or are there better ways of structuring it or am I just overthinking it? I would greatly appreciate any advice and suggestions 🙂 Best, Max0 -
One website with multiple advertising domains?
Working on a website for a business with distinct lines of business, one is more B2C and one is B2B yet the type of service is related. To think of an example, let's say it's for a photographer who does weddings, but also does real estate photography. He wants to make sure he can market to each audience separately so when they go to his homepage the homepage content is oriented for the services that audience is looking for. If you use two separate websites, they have to be totally unique to avoid dupe content flags, and you also end up diluting each website's domain authority since you are spreading your inbound links between two different websites. However would this be the optimum strategy then? One website hosted on: bozophotography.com A second domain: bozoweddings.com that has a 301 redirect to the wedding section home page on bozophotography.com A third domain: bozorealestatephotos.com that has a 301 redirect to the real estate section home page. So on certain advertising, business cards, etc, the business could choose which domain they want to publicize to insure the audience sees a home page related to that line of business. I suppose you could publicize it as a subdomain like: realestate.bozophotography.com or as a slash address: bozophotography.com/weddings but those seem much less professional, visually, than just having bozoweddings.com. There is rumor you don't quite get 100% of the link juice, but the main domain would be used the majority of the time so I really see no downside?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee0 -
Website dropped out from Google index
Howdy, fellow mozzers. I got approached by my friend - their website is https://www.hauteheadquarters.com She is saying that they dropped from google index over night - and, as you can see if you google their name, website url or even site: , most of the pages are not indexed. Home page is nowhere to be found - that's for sure. I know that they were indexed before. Google webmaster tools don't have any manual actions (at least yet). No sudden changes in content or backlink profile. robots.txt has some weird rule - disallow everything for EtaoSpider. I don't know if google would listen to that - robots checker in GWT says it's all good. Any ideas why that happen? Any ideas what I should check? P.S. Just noticed in GWT there was a huge drop in indexed pages within first week of August. Still no idea why though. P.P.S. Just noticed that there is noindex x-robots-tag in headers... Anyone knows where this can be set?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Ranking in SERPs but not using terms on website.
As far as I know, it's not normally possible for a website to rank for a keyword that is not mentioned on the website. I have seen a website that ranks very well for key terms and yet they are not mentioned anywhere on the website, I have run advanced search & checked using tools including cloak checker on my findings. How can this be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lee-murphy0 -
Merging 4 websites into one for a new site release (301 question)
Hi guys and girls, I have a client that has 4 very outdated websites with about 50 pages on each. They are made up like: 1 brand group and 3 for each individual key service they offer, so let's call them: brand.com (A) brand-service-1.com (B) brand-service-2.com (C) brand-service-3.com (D) We've rebuilt the main site and aggregated all the content from the others (99% re-written). Am I correct in thinking the process for the new lauch would be: 1. Launch the new site on brand.com (A) and 301 all the old brand.com (A) pages to the related pages on the new site. 2. Redirect the other websites (B,C,D) on a domain level to the new site on the brand.com (A) domain. 3. Clean up the old URL's, sitemaps, errors in Google WMT Is this right? Anything I missed/better practices? I was also wondering if I should redirect B,C,D in stages, or use page level redirects.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
Effects of having both http and https on my website
You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec1