By: You can have multiple domains for your business or just one. After 10 years of doing SEO for multiple brand niches, I can tell you that there isn`t a right or wrong answer to this question.
Every decision around architecture and resulting strategy must be personalised according to the business objectives, strengths and available resource. There’s more risk and resource in managing multiple domains, so there are considerable arguments as well as ROI potential to evaluate first. In this article we’re going to illustrate examples of when you might need multiple domains, and the SEO implications of having them. Also, some of the potential risk of investing in multiple domains.
But first, lets define what we mean by a domain:
A domain name identifies the location of your website on the Internet. For example, https://www.argos.co.uk/ is the domain name for Argos Limited. A multiple domain strategy means that a person or organisation owns multiple websites hosted on different domain names all within the same competing niche.
It`s important to understand that a domain can be also a blog, subdomain or your site translated into different languages.
Following the example used above, here are a couple or other domains that Argos Limited is using:
- https://www.argos-support.co.uk/ – Platform dedicated to provide support for products
- https://www.argos.ie/ – Domain destinated for consumers based in Ireland
- https://argosforbusiness.co.uk/ – Platform for Argos partners
- https://www.about.sainsburys.co.uk/ – The parent company website
As you can see, all of the five domains listed above are owned by the same company. Even thought some of them might have a different purpose, https://www.argos.co.uk/ and https://www.argos.ie/ are competing for the same specific keywords and phrases in the search engines.
Read also: 10 Most Common Hreflang Mistakes You Should Avoid
When a business might need multiple domains?
There are many brands that use this strategy to dominate the SERPs. Here are some examples of businesses that could benefit from having multiple domains:
Worldwide businesses
Amazon, considered one of the most influential and economic forces in the world, has multiple e-commerce websites translated into different languages: amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.it, etc. There are many SEO advantages for a company like Amazon to own a country-specific domain. Google uses geotargeting when displaying results, and this strategy helped Amazon to become a renown worldwide brand.
Parent company with multiple brands
If you go at the mall, you will probably find at least three clothing brands owned by Inditex. To mention just a few: Zara, Bershka, Pull & Bear, Stradivarius, Massimo Dutti, etc. Even though they are all apparel brands, they aren’t inherently associated with each other due to branding, pricing, audience mismatch, or brand affinity/market share. So, a multiple domain SEO strategy is the option that Inditex have chosen.
Businesses that want to dominate the SERPs
If you want to have as many results as you can in the first page of Google, it`s impossible to achieve that with a single website. Therefore, buying more domains or a competitor`s website, or creating blogs, could help you achieve your goal.
In the end, any business can have multiple domains, but does it worth the investment?
Potential risks of having multiple domains
Cost – Having multiple websites for your business can become a problem, especially if they’re not related. You’ll have to spend more time maintaining them than just having one website, and you’ll have to pay extra for each site separately. Meaning a different SEO strategy for each of them, to avoid duplication. All of these translate into higher costs.
Long term results – We can assume that the end goal of investing in multiple websites is to make more money, but search engine optimisation is a long-game strategy. You’ll need a solid budget that can carry you until you see success.
Investing in multiple domains involves diluting your efforts for ranking. It’s easier to rank one site with multiple keywords if that site already has high authority, than it is for multiple low-authority sites to rank for similar keywords.
Cannibalisation – We often discover that when we’re working with businesses with multiple sites they have duplicate content through products or categories. Rewriting product descriptions involves a mammoth effort and sometimes it’s not worthen allocating so many resources for this exercise, because the results just don`t pay off. These kind of websites end up negatively affecting each other’s SEO performance, which results in a decrease in organic traffic and positions.
Brand weakness – As presented above, different websites require a different strategy, which in time can lead to a decrease in the overall brand quality, if your budget isn`t consistent enough to support your SEO strategy. Let`s take as example a store that sells wallpapers and paint. Building two or three microsites involves costs for the development, a strategy to differentiate each other and a strong marketing budget. In the long-term process of gaining rankings, you might find your brand to be weakened.
Link Equity Dilution – Backlinks are an important ranking factor for most of the search engines. Having a good link equity means that quality/popular websites are pointing to your website. When owing multiple domains, there is a risk of diluting the power of backlinks pointing to them. Let`s take the Argos owned domains presented above as example. We have the following two categories on each of the websites:
- https://www.argos.co.uk/browse/health-and-beauty/c:29203/?clickOrigin=header:cat:menu:health+and+beauty
- https://www.argos.ie/static/Browse/ID72/14418350/c_1/1%7
Ccategory_root%7CHealth+and+personal+care%7C14418350.htm
Both of them are displaying the same types of products. If we look at the backlinks pointing to each one of them, we can observe that the first websites has more, and that`s the one that Google displays when searching after “Argos health products”.
SEO tips when having multiple domains
#1 Monitor results
Constantly monitoring every websites` performance will not only help you see the results of your efforts, but also to react in case something goes wrong with your strategy. You might observe that one of the websites starts to rank better for some of the keywords that your targeting, or that one of them is not ranking at all, and maybe it`s time to stop investing in it.
#2 Avoid cannibalisation
Organise your websites independently and try avoiding as much as you can duplication. Below you can find some examples of good practices:
- Choose a unique design for each of the websites
- Pay attention when designing the internal architecture. Create unique categories, and descriptions.
- Generate unique meta tags and products descriptions by creating algorithms that automatically generates unique content
- Create and upload quality and original content on each of the websites
#3 Create social media profiles for each brand
This will not only help your customer engage with your brand via social media but will also contribute to have better quality signals for Google` EAT algorithm, that stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. (You can send us an inquire for an EAT audit)
In the same way that you split off your main brand into microsites, you should do the same on social media, and create individual accounts on any platforms you use, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Conclusion
Having multiple domains can be a winning strategy, but it can also increase costs and resources, spreading both too thinly to deliver a return on investment.
Our team has great experience in optimising multi-domains businesses, and we can create a algo-friendly strategy that could help you rank higher in Google or other search engines. We also have our own Hreflang tool, that we recommend using for multi-market websites.
Send us a message if you want to take your business to the next level!
