Niche Markets & Establishing Authority: Single Domain or Multiple (Original Content)?

I am working on a redesign where the company is THE authority on the subject, but organic results do not reflect this.

There is little competition in the industry, but a smaller company in particular has a heavy saturation of organic search results through, IMHO, running a variety of websites with keyword-rich domains with original content, plus a widely-used (for the market size) public forum.

The main company’s site currently has a great deal of unique content and eCommerce. Aside from the many changes that need to be made for SEO, here is what I am pondering.

Two options:

  1. Continue with the single domain (which is company name only, e.g., XYZbrand.com), keeping content and shopping on one site. Restructure, improve SEO, etc., add SEM.

  2. Separate content from shopping, with the content on a very direct, keyword-based domain (e.g., WatercolorPainting.com:wink: shopping would remain on the current domain (XYZbrand.com).

As the site is now, it can be very confusing for a potential customer to understand what the product is for, much less make a decision to purchase. We want the potential customer to stay on the XYZbrand.com site (or the WatercolorPainting.com site) for research and feel confident in making a purchase on XYZbrand.com site instead of the competitor.

Will splitting this site into two be more harmful or beneficial for this type of user, as well as for search results? This is probably as clear as mud, so please let me know if there is anything I can clarify. TIA,

A. Henson

I don’t think i understand your post 100% but correct me if i’m wrong. You’re talking about including the brand in the domain name? what about keywords? it’s optimal for SEO to include a keyword in your domains along with your brand.

That is pretty much it. Right now, the domain is the company name, which contains no keywords pertinent to the products. So it is like XYZbrand.com instead of XYZbrandWatercolors.com. However, they do own WatercolorPainting.com. Would it be better to separate out the content from the store? So XYZbrand.com would have the online store to buy Watercolor supplies, and WatercolorPainting.com would be the content side? Or keep everything under XYZbrand.com and forward WatercolorPainting.com to XYZbrand.com? (All these domains are examples only.)

If Google thinks the site is confusing, that might be one of the reasons it is not ranking better. User experience and interaction is one of the largest factors that Google takes into consideration when promoting a site.

Your domain choices should reflect what will make the site(s) easiest for people to use.

Exact match domains don’t work nearly as well as they used to. Nowadays, I prefer using a branded domain over an exact match.

You can use broad name domain something related to your company as emd do work but not as affective as earlier, so try to get new domain and unique content on them that will help.