When One Website is NOT Enough?
Business Thoughts, Website Tips December 10th. 2008, 11:21amOn occasion we have a client who asks, “If one website is good for my business, then doesn’t it stand to reason that 2, 3, 4 or more sites would be even better?” The answer is “MAYBE – It all depends on your audience.”If you serve just one audience, then one website is probably all you need.
If you serve multiple audiences, you should first determine – are their information needs different enough to warrant separate websites? If yes, then perhaps you should have multiple websites geared specifically at each audience.
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For the sake of example, here’s a story…
Imagine you sell goats. For the past 20 years your target audience has been people who buy your goats for milk production. You’ve had a website for the past 6 years that promotes your goats’ abilities to make prolific amounts of tasty, nutritious milk.
Then you get a phone call one day. Someone visited your website and wants to know if your goats are good grazers. You say, “Why sure, our goats are good grazers. They eat just about anything, but they prefer to eat the finest clover hay which makes their milk taste ever-so-sweet.”
And the caller says, “Oh no, I don’t want your goats for milk production. I started a new company called Rent-A-Goat Services. We’re looking for friendly goats to use as an efficient, holistic, environmentally healthy approach to weed control. It sounds like your goats wouldn’t be good for this since they’ve been spoiled on the finest clover hay. I’ll call someone else. Toodle-loo.”
Initially, you are surprised, but because you are such a brilliant entrepreneur, you recognize a new market for your goats. Immediately you call your favorite web design company and get started on a new website that promotes your goats as the world’s most voracious weed eaters. Six months later you’ve sold more goats than the previous five years combined. You decide to establish a company called, “Hungry Goat Staffing Services.” A year later you are the preferred goat provider to Rent-A-Goat Services all over the country. Two years later you decide to sell your goat staffing company and move to Tuscany to learn Italian, drink good Chianti, and perfect your Mostaccioli recipe.
You get the picture? If you decide you need more than one website, keep these things in mind:
1. Multiple sites can be good for your search engine ranking - because you can cross link between sites and because you’ll have multiple search engine listings.
2. Managing multiple sites can be time-consuming. Don’t spread yourself to thin. If you can’t handle the maintenance of several sites, then just stick with one.
3. Don’t cannibalize from your other sites. If you set up two or three sites that market the same product, they may compete for visitors and may not help you increase market share.
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By the way, Rent-A-Goat is the real deal. We don’t make this stuff up!
There really are Rent-A-Goat services sprouting up around the country. Here’s a link to one in San Francisco City Crazing.
For small lawns and those hard to reach places…
… consider baby pigmy goats. They’re cute, bouncy, always hungry, and many people will think they’re just strange looking cats – which means you can keep them in your backyard in Ann Arbor. Perhaps they’ll become friends with your flock of urban chickens.
December 11th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Great article! I’ve tried two sites and learned that for my business, it is best to have just one. I can always add a page for new offerings–which is a snap with the ICM Content Management system (yes, I still love it!)
Of course, now I’m consumed with the idea of having chickens and little goats. Where will you be keeping the ICM herd? I need some milk for homemade chevre…
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:25 pm
I heard having multiple websites is a red flag for search engines – a clear indication that you are trying occupy multiple domains with identical content. In cases like this, Google will typically penalize both domains and this could be why a website content is so poorly indexed. This could also have a negative reflection on all subdomain including your blogsite. I also noticed that each domain (with and without “www”) are treated as separate sites, so you really have to be careful on duplicate website domains.
“If a website is using 100% duplicate content then Google will penalize you in their search engine rankings and in some extreme cases even sandbox your website completely.”
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:31 pm
If you have several websites with separate URLs but the same content, it is DEFINITELY a red flag for the search engines.
The only time you should have multiple sites is when they are all unique and geared at different audiences.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
You may also want to pay attention to where the sites are hosted. If all of the sites are hosted on the same Class C IP address they are likely to be deemed as part of the same ‘ownership’ and will not pass pagerank to each other.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Perhaps different sites that showcase the benefits of different aspects or branches of a company could be beneficial for promotional reasons, but I think many companies take this way too far. It is intuitive to expect a central place of organization. There are many companies with horribly disorganized web sites that aren’t intuitive to users. They’re overgrown monstrosities, and it’s hard to figure out exactly what they do. Too much information in one place is only a bad thing if it’s overloaded and poorly organized, which I’ve had to deal extensively. However, pushing your content too far apart is nothing but bad new in my opinion.