Many business owners understandably take a hands-on approach
with their online marketing and SEO tactics. But, no matter how involved they
are in their marketing endeavors, the fact remains: they are not subject matter
experts in the world of marketing and web design. It should be noted that when
it comes to a local business website, not everything you’ve heard are indeed
best practices.
Often, SEO marketing techniques are misunderstood. One of
these often misguided efforts is the practice of creating multiple websites
under one business, or hoarding related domain names, which are then redirected
to the main site. We see this many
times.
When business owners approach us they:
a) Already have another website, but want to have more than
one.
b) They bought several additional keyword-based domain names
that are set to redirect to their main site.
Although the right intentions are there, in truth, these
efforts may end up hurting your online presence more than helping.
This scenario is more common than you’d expect, with many
local business owners believing that more is better. “If I have more online
properties, I’ll be more visible. “If I
have more assets to leverage, it will strengthen the main website and create
more rankings and visibility.”
Before diving into a potential headache of what might be
counterproductive online marketing tactics, let’s look at a few reasons why
having multiple websites for your local business is a bad idea:
1. Time & Effort
Most business owners are already too busy running their
business and don’t have all the time necessary to allocate to building and
maintaining one website, let alone two or more. And more often than not, they
don’t have the technical know-how or a webmaster or SEO expert on hand to help
them out.
However, when it comes ranking successfully in the local SEO
game, your website actually requires a good amount of unique content, quality
backlinks, and both technical and non-technical SEO. Unless you’re fully
prepared to carry out the maintenance, SEO, link building and more content for
both sites, I wouldn’t recommend this approach. Instead, I would recommend
focusing on your business first, and keeping time spent on online assets to a
minimum, managing only one website, and perhaps even hiring a professional to
help manage it for you.
2. Duplicate Content
In the online world duplicate content can be quite a
concern. Not only for content targeting your business brand name and contact
details, but also for the targeted keywords you will be optimizing your website
for.
Search engines like Google will see two sites with similar
or duplicate content, will pick one of the sites (more often the older more
authoritative site with a history of backlinks) and pay less attention to the
2nd one.
On the other hand, there are particular cases where the
secondary site accidentally steals the ranking spotlight and takes away
visibility and value from the original site. It may be a constant tug-of-war on
which website Google should rank higher.
3. Search Engine Rankings
Let’s assume you find the time and resources to build a
second site, create unique non-duplicate content, implement proper SEO, and
build quality backlinks.
When you have multiple websites targeting the same industry,
geography, and keywords, you will essentially end up competing against
yourself, especially if you have the same business name, address and contact
info.
Search engines such as Google frown upon businesses having
slightly different names but essentially the same service, address, and contact
info. And when these similar differences start popping up throughout the
internet, both the inconsistencies in business contact info as well as
duplicated info on multiple business sites can and will most likely negatively
impact your rankings.
Also, in terms of link building per address and local
citations, most business listing websites only allow one unique business to be
listed. Therefore, trying to build inbound links to multiple websites
ultimately ends up limiting you to listing one website or another,
strengthening one, while weakening another.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to point all links to one site
and receive 100% ‘link juice’, as opposed to only getting 50%, 25% each?
4. Customer Confusion
Having multiple websites under one business may confuse
visitors as they are not sure which of the many websites is the “official”
website. This can be a major factor in converting visitors to customers due to
the potential loss of trust and possible business. People searching online may
not have a high level of patience for making this determination.
5. Are there any Exceptions?
When it comes to local businesses you generally don’t want
to have more than one website, but there are a few exceptions to this rule:
– The business services are so different that service segmentation makes sense.
– It is an international business where it might makes sense to have both a .com version as well as a .ca in order to better cater to each demographic.
– You actually do have two separate businesses, each with a unique name, address, and contact details.
A Better Approach
First off, don’t buy industry/geography related domains for
the sake of creating multiple sites or redirecting the domains to your main
site.
If you’ve already purchased these additional domain names,
then sure, you could use domain redirection (‘301 redirects’) to the main site.
However, this won’t provide much SEO value unless the site has a previous
history with preexisting external links pointed to your site. And in most cases,
your domain is relatively new, so this tactic will be providing no SEO value.
Instead of building multiple sites, and all the work that
goes into it, focus your energy, time and resources into a single online
entity. Build one main website and build it great. If you don’t know how to
build one, it’s best to hire an expert.
If you need an easy-to-navigate website that sets you apart from your
competition, flows in a way to best turn visitors into customers, and maximizes
your SEO, SK Consulting can help!
Summary
When you start trying to optimize and leverage more than one
entity you begin to spread your efforts too thin. Instead of spending a ton of
time, energy, and resources to build a few mediocre websites that have a bit of
authority – why not use that same effort to build one high-quality and highly-authoritative
website that will have a much better chance at ranking than the smaller
counterparts?
If you are not a web designer or developer, spend your time,
efforts and energy on doing what you do best.
Hiring an expert to combine your websites and build one, comprehensive
site will save you the time, stress and headaches you would inevitably
incur. What’s your time worth to
you? What is gaining the business you
are currently losing worth to you?
Having one concise website, designed by an expert will give
your business a better chance of success.
Need help? Contact us today!
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