Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
-
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands.
An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this)
We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend.
Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities.
Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains.
Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site:
[Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com]
The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3:
Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.'
Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
-
Thank you for your excellent response, Alan.
Reviewing my post, I did not explain the situation 100% accurately.
Rather than integrating all our shops, in fact we would just be taking one of the shops we run, our main site, and wondering whether to consolidate with two new shops running on two new domains (these domains being excellent keywords).
An important point is that we changed the name of the site and domain name mid-2011, to a more international name. At first this clearly had an effect on our Google ranking, although having just had the best Christmas sales ever, we feel this has succeeded. (301 redirects were set up)
It would appear that the decision whether or not to integrate now to a unified domain would be affected by this fact. The name of our current main site would not be suitable as an umbrella term for all.
-
Thanks for your suggestion, Shane, this is certainly what we can see as a potential advantage, for that way of going.
-
While Shane is correct in general (less effort to drive links, value and trust to a single entity), deciding whether to go with separate entities or one unified entity under a broader reach focus is always a challenge. When you've had split properties for an extended period, and have invested tremendous effort over time in driving the value, relevance and importance of each separately, consideration becomes even more important.
How much time, effort resources have been invested in the split properties? a few weeks or months? Or years of time and cost? How much would it cost to rebrand each of the individual entities when melded into one? Factor in the need to implement flawless 301 redirects for every single product and page on every single site pointing to the new location. (301 redirects carry "most" of the existing SEO value,weight and strength, yet multiplied over hundreds or thousands of pages, the "slight" hit on each may cause at least a temporary overall down-side to rankings).
Having said that, by bringing it all together, when executed properly, you can still drive the marketing for individual "brands" - if you have truly well designed individual "category" landing pages set up (each one replacing the previous individual entity home pages) and by pointing social media and link building efforts at those individually. Yet you then also open your company up to the opportunity to drive the new umbrella brand. But only if there is truly enough of a broader appeal in regard to what people in your target market(s) actually search for online.
If there is a big enough market at that broader level, not only do you get the ability to reach people who might otherwise have not known about your offerings, you get the ability to cross-sell as well.
If you have serious concerns about the broader market opportunity, or the logistics (especially given the 301 redirect issue, for example), maintaining individual brand properties and implementing an easy to use cross-site navigation feature (that doesn't confuse prospective customers) could be an interim solution that risks less. While it might offer the potential for less long-term reward (that comes from reaching that new audience in a massive push way), it offers less risk, less logistic effort, and could very well prove out whether there's cross-selling value.
Then, after a couple years in the hybrid, if enough cross-selling occurs, that could be the vote of confidence you need to then take the next plunge, melding it all into one.
Be aware however, that you should give at least a couple years in between changes though - having too many hops in a site-wide 301 redirect model will cause more harm than good usually.
-
Hi,
I am in no way experienced with E-commerce as i have never done it, but from an SEO/Marketing perspective.
In my opinion Option 3 would be the most helpful both in SEO and Branding.
Because...
SEO - you have now consolidated your link building potential into one domain instead of spreading it out. Also this way you can get a little more keyword power without resorting to exact match tactics which personally I think are going to "fizzle" out over the next few years.
Marketing/Branding - You have created a better user experience and also the possibility of an up sell.. A person that is looking for a handbag, might also be looking for a matching pair of shoes... So use a "suggestion" algorithm at checkout that suggest "relevant" products. Option 3 in my opinion is also better for branding, as you can easier position yourself better in your filed as a "One Stop Shop" for all your "accessory" needs. If you have multiple different domains, it is hard to get a "brandname" going for yourself - even if you just sell other peoples brands.
I am sure others will have more suggestions, just my 2 cents
w00t!
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 subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
One domain or two for one company with two lines of business?
Let's say you are building a new company that is involved in two lines of business. Let's for example say one line of business is handling logistics for large conventions where the customer(s) are large corporation and the other line is for wedding planning. Let's say that for certain reasons the owner wants to operate under one brand name, say "PROEVENT" So they will market themselves as PROEVENT Convention Logistics and PROEVENT Wedding Planners. From an SEO perspective, if you have one side of the business doing B-to-B corporate business and the other doing B-to-C do you create two different websites on different domains (proeventconventions.com and proeventweddings.com) with unique design and content, or, do you just use provent.com in order to build better domain authority and on your marketing you use conventions.provent.com that takes you to the convention section of the website and weddings.provent.com takes you to the weddings section?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee0 -
Consolidating Multiple Domains into A Single Domain
I have a client who's website is an amalgamation of multiple domains. jacksonhole.net is the main domain but the site passes traffic back and forth from the following domains/sites. My questions is, would it it be better for SEO to consolidate all of these domains under the single high authority domain and 301 redirect the rest or is that a really bad idea? Thanks for your help. jacksonhole.net (Domain Authority 31) jackson-hole-rental-condos.com (Domain Authority 22) jackson-hole-rental-homes.com (Domain Authority 21) j acksonholehotelguide.com (Domain Authority 19)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbaxa-2613381 -
Display:None CSS & SEO
Hi A while back I was told that using the display:none tag to hide content you want minimised is bad for onpage SEO - is this the case? It's not that we want to hide it from Google, we just don't want it taking up a huge amount of space on product pages. I have found some of these on our site, and want to know how bad they are. Is the content under the tag going to be ignored? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Domain name suffix impact on SEO
Hello there, We are about to launch a new website and were wondering what impact a specific suffix would have from an SEO point of view. We were thinking about going for a domain which ends in .london as oppose to .com We are based in London and sell world wide via our website. We are suggesting www.domain.london as oppose to www.domain.com I would appreciate your views... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
Hi I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors. The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages. I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this. The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening. Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alextanner0 -
Max # of Products / Links per Page on E-Commerce Site
We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page. Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products. While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links. Would love some guidance on: Maximum number of internal links on a page If Google frowns on really long category pages Anything else I should be considering when making this decision Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY2 -
Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo
I'm looking for some clarity... Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop. The following are points to consider when responding The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized. There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on. There is roughly 2000 products Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself. Should we really be considering this path? The domain is diveidc.com One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner. We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0