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.
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
-
Weird Site is linking to our site and links appears to be broken
I have got a lot of weird links indexed from this page: http://kzs.uere.info/files/images/dining-table-and-2-upholstered-chairs.html When clicking the link it shows 404. Also, the spam score is huge. What do you guys suggest to do with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Miniorek
Could it be done by somebody to get our rankings down or domain penalized? Best Regards
Mike & Alex0 -
Google favoring old site over new site...
Hi, I started a new site for a client: www.berenjifamilylaw.com. His old site: www.bestfamilylawattorney.com was too loaded up with bad links. Here's the weird part: when you Google: "Los Angeles divorce lawyer" you see the old site come up on the 21st page, but Google doesn't even show the new site (even though it is indexed). It's been about 2 weeks now and no change. Has anyone experienced something like this? If so, what did you do (if anything). Also, I did NOT do a 301 redirect from old to new b/c of spammy links. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Is my site penalized by Google?
Let's say my website is aaaaa.com and company name is aaaaa Systems. When I search Google aaaaa my site do not come up at all. When I search for "aaaaa Systems" it comes up. But in WMT I see quite a few clicks from aaaaa as keyword. Most of the traffic is brand keywords only. I never received any manual penalty in WMT ever. Is the site penalized or regular algorithm issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
What recommendations do you have for the SEO of this site?
Hello, Could you glance at this site and let me know if you see anything we could improve upon? www.nlpca.com A couple of notes: We're over-optimized for the term "NLP" on the home page. We're removing the footer links soon. We have 2 locations: San Francisco, CA and Salt Lake City, UT. Our main keyword is "NLP Training" but we would like to rank higher for the keyword "NLP". Also note that we're completely white hat, but we have international site-wide backlinks, and a couple of site-wide backlinks in site's footers - all friends and colleagues of ours.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
New Google Update?
Hey guys, So I have noticed a few of my clients rankings drop suddenly as of last week. They went from page 1 to page 4 and I they have been on page 1 for years, it happened around 17/01/2013. Anyone heard anything about a new update? Sample URL & Keyword: http://www.childrensfunkyfurniture.com/childrens-beds Childrens Beds Your help would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Any SEO suggestions for my site?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Does anyone have any suggestions for any on-site SEO that would benefit my website? Any recommendations, big or small are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor1 -
Help with a Sticky Site
Hey Everyone - I work for a company that is just getting into SEO. We have had some successes, but one project lately has got us stumped. We have been working hard, but have been unable to make an impact in Google rankings with the following site: http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/index.cfm/DesMoines We are trying to optimize for the keyword phrase, "des moines hotel" This hotel is a branch location of a hotel chain in the Midwest. *Note we've already moved up some other branch locations for this hotel chain successfully. We've used several tools including the SEOmoz tool and seem to have higher marks than those sites that rank above us in Google surprisingly. Any idea what we're missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markhope0