SEO Question for multi-brach company: seperate domains, subdomains or all on one domain?

[dev1235]

Hi there,

Just after some opinions as we plan a long term SEO / website structure for the next step of a business.

We have a company that provides a range of services, and looking to expand into more. The current website is ____kitchens.com. This site promotes a range of services including kitchen renovations, custom made cabinetry, wardrobes, doors, stairs etc. This site has been running for 30+years and has good rankings.

We are planning the long term business strategy. thinking of creating a "__group" parent company that will contain all the sub brands ("_Kitchens", "_doors", "_wardrobes", "_stairs" etc) eventually each sub company may be sold or partially directed by different people (but still part-owned by the parent company) not likely to happen for 5-10 years. The question is, should we split all into unique domains? use subdomains, or keep them all tied up on the one domain? (the current domain is _kitchens.com so not very versatile in its name. It would be a bit weird to have doors.___kitchens.com, but could be doors.___group.com / kitchens.___group.com) The current ___kitchens.com website does have good history and ranking though so would be a shame to start over with that one.) We are also looking at selling flat pack items so would be setting up an e-commerce store, this would sell items crossing multiple categories (e.g. wardrobes, cabinets, kitchens) We could have a shop.companyname.com subdomain or have seperate shops for each.).

Not overly worried about managing multiple sites as we have an in-house developer, but not sure of the best option regarding SEO in the long term and figure its worth putting in a bit of thought before jumping into it.

Obviously keeping everything on one domain will be easier, but in the long run if they are owned by different people it will nice to have seperate reporting and targeted SEO for each keyword/service. There will always be a bit of cross-over & collaboration (e.g. a client who needs a kitchen often needs a wardrobe and doors too)

Curious what others would do in this situation?

Cheers!

 

[ElizabethRule]

It's way easier to do SEO for 1 website vs multiple. I would likely go the 1 domain route and use subfolders instead of subdomains to segment/silo the different service offerings. If the ____kitchens.com ranks well now for "kitchen" type searches, but you want to get a new domain that better represents the brand, you can always create a new site with a new domain name, migrate all the ____kitchens.com pages to this new domain and redirect all the URLs to those pages. That will help you maintain your authority from the ____kitchens.com domain and help the new domain rank better for those types of searches.

All the sub services you mention sound related, all seem like some type of "remodeling" or "builder" service, so I think with the right website hierarchy you can rank well for all these with 1 domain. Look into "content siloing" - sounds like that might be a good strategy here. Bright Local has a good article on it Content Silos for Local SEO: Why They Work, and How to Overcome Challenges - BrightLocal

 

[GoLocal]

Depends on the goal. If you want to retain control or minimize cost for sure one domain. If you want to maximize reach or scope for sure multiple. SEO is all about approaches, Ted Kubaitis often says, "split them, let them co-rank, and compete with each other in the top ten" but your mileage may vary.

Might be hard to sell divisions yet retain central control as a part owner — the people who buy in are inevitably going to have conflicting interests with each other. Cheers.