One Website or Multiple?

Is it better to have one large website or several targeted websites related to individual products or services you offer? Through our experience with clients across the nation in various industries, we have found that many businesses have multiple websites, but often are not maintained or optimized like they should be. As a general rule, it’s almost always more effective to have one authoritative website rather than multiple, small sites. Why? One website is far more productive for your budget and reaching optimal rankings while also creating brand consistency,

Additional websites are typically created as landing pages with keyword-relevant domain names. For example, a business may have a main domain for their brand name (companyname.com) but have other landing page sites for services they offer with a local keyword in the domain (city+serviceoffered.com). Keyword domain names used to be much more of a ranking factor than they are today. Even if your site has a keyword rich domain, your site won’t rank for those keywords unless it’s probably optimized and trusted by search engines. These landing page sites usually have thin content and a limited number of pages–two things search engines don’t like.

Having multiple sites is generally counterproductive for your SEO budget because instead of all of the effort going to helping your main site rank well, it’s divided amongst a variety of small sites that don’t have a lot of potential for ranking well in the first place.

Additionally, having multiple sites doesn’t help to improve your brand consistency, which is an important part of your overall marketing strategy. Multiple sites promote a disjointed brand image and can also detract from your brand credibility, especially if small sites lack design integrity and aren’t maintained.

In short, you will most likely get better results with one great website rather than multiple marginal sites, even if they do have keyword-relevant domains. In the long run, it will save you a lot of time, money, and effort while trying to help your business get the most visibility in search engines. If you have multiple websites but aren’t sure what steps to take next, contact us today to find out what our SEO team can do for you.