It can be confusing for users to have multiple websites or domains that cover the same or similar subjects. This will reduce your content’s power in search engine rankings. This article reviews the main reasons to merge websites/domains and what you have to do on the technical side to make this change.
Combining Web Properties
You can easily get distracted and create a lot of websites for your brands. Hosting sites and developing WordPress themes is a great way to get sidetracked. We enjoy spinning up new areas for testing. It’s fun to choose a domain and spin up a website. For example, warmfuzzysocks.com is a great domain for testing.
We did exactly that when we launched our theme and hosted brands. I went as far as registering the trademarks of the brands with the state.
We launched these shiny new websites and watched organic traffic grow. We tracked our keywords and measured all of our efforts to increase the traffic on our sites.
All was well until we realized that our three websites were in direct competition for organic traffic. That realization was painful. This is a cute little chart to show it.
We realized that we needed to combine all of our websites. This gave us an opportunity to rethink the brand, web design, and mission to serve our customers better better.
Bloggers can grow their sites and make money with our software products, managed services, educational materials, and professional services. By having all of our products together in one place, we are able to provide our WordPress website themes, plugins, and blogging community to our customers in a more efficient way. We can also focus more on our blogging strategy because we are able to write about the topics that matter to bloggers across our entire product catalog.
Multiple websites were cool. Although it was a great way to get started and allowed us to build our brand and products, this was probably not the best approach. Combining our websites allowed us to send a consistent and clear message to customers.
Combining Websites: Top Reasons
Many business owners and marketers believe that having multiple domains will make it easier to brand the different parts of their business. You may have been one of those people if you’ve read the paragraphs above.
In some cases, it is fine to keep websites separate. If you have duplicate content problems, are not sure which website the content belongs to, or if your websites are competing for rankings, it might be time to merge your sites.
Having multiple domains with related keywords, brands, and topics can kill your business. Your website is the way you establish domain authority and how you represent your company to Google and the online community. Separating things can confuse all parties.
Here are five reasons why it is not a good idea to have multiple websites.
Domain Authority is harmed by duplicate content.
Content that is duplicated on a website can appear in multiple locations. The duplicate content can appear on different webpages of the same website or various websites.
Search engines have a hard time identifying the original author of duplicate pieces of identical content. Google, Bing, and another search engines cannot tell if site B or site A is more relevant due to the same content. Where to send organic traffic.
Search engines can’t direct link metrics, such as trust, authority, and link juice, to duplicate content. When that content is spread out across multiple websites, it reduces your domain authority and the SEO value of your material and lowers your overall search ranking.
Search Engine Rankings Suffer
Imagine you have spent the time to manage multiple websites. You will also ensure that there is no duplication of content. Having numerous sites is still not the best idea since they will compete for search engine rankings. You Yourkely use the likely me keywords or similar ones unless they cater to products of a very different nature. It is better to focus on one website as the main source of traffic.
You may also encounter problems if you list your address on multiple websites or Google+ Local pages. Businesses with slightly different names should not list and promote the same services, addresses, and phone numbers.
Google dislikes websites for each location.
This point was discussed earlier using the franchise as an example. Many people believe they should create a separate website for each location or facility. Google recommends that you build a single website with landing pages for every site and add a tool to locate the place.
John Mueller, Google’s John Mueller, gives one of the most compelling reasons to avoid managing multiple domains per location.
By focusing on one website, our algorithms can better understand your site and its services, as well as the regions you serve. It is not only difficult for our algorithms to understand, but it can also be difficult for the users. Imagine if you had separate websites for each place that you shipped to.
Customer Confusion
What happens if a customer searches for the service that you offer but lists it on two websites? This creates confusion for your customer. They may see similarities but not be certain that the products or services they are viewing come from the same company. This uncertainty can make it difficult for visitors to trust you and negatively affect your conversion rate. Most people will not bother to go through the hassle; they’ll leave.
Consider your social media accounts, which you probably already use for marketing. If you haven’t already, here are reasons why you should be using social. Double social media accounts are time-consuming and add an extra layer of complexity. No matter where your audience finds you, you want to make it clear who you are, what services you offer, and how they can get the information they require.
Paid search is not efficient.
Search engine optimization is easier to implement on one website than on multiple websites. Here is a list of SEO Best Practices for WordPress sites and Yoast.
It is also easier and more efficient to concentrate all of your efforts not only on SEO but also on SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or paid search. It is particularly true if you have websites that share keywords. Your websites may compete for Google Adwords and waste marketing dollars.
