It’s not uncommon for a growing business to create new domains and websites for multiple service offerings (or offshoot ventures) that arise throughout the course of business. At some point, though, the business needs to take a holistic look at its digital marketing strategy and determine what is best going forward.
You might be thinking, should I merge my many sites into one domain, multiple domains, multiple subdomains or some sort of combination?
Let’s consider several factors:
1. Your Audiences
To help you answer the question of whether or not to merge your domains and websites, you should first ask: “Who do we want to attract?” And then: “What do we need to say to them?” Start by planning out the overall strategy, including:
• Identifying the primary personas (limit to no more than five)
• Determining their “journey” or their path to purchase
• Creating a content strategy for each target audience
If your products and/or solutions speak to very disparate audiences, then you may need to consider your branding efforts as being somewhat distinct. If there are similarities, then maybe not.
2. Domain Authority
You should also consider how well-known each domain is already. You must take into consideration the domain’s authority, inbound activity and traffic sources so you can make an educated decision using data. You never want to eliminate or sacrifice a high-traffic website just to merge domains into a lesser-known brand website.
Imagine trying to count the number of eyeballs viewing your websites, and each one counted as a prospective buyer of your product or service. Would you make decisions differently about what to turn on and off? Of course; you would base it on the number of eyeballs. As a rule of thumb, you should aim to minimize any loss of good traffic by optimizing a website that just isn’t converting visitors into leads or customers.
3. Administration
New websites are often created due to a lack of internal communication or processes. We worked with a large organization to consolidate 30 websites into six. When questioning them about why multiple websites were created, we discovered many rogue employees were creating websites to communicate information to the public in their own way, causing an inconsistent brand look and feel.
The administration of the website is a vital consideration around how to merge content. You may want to allow access for employees, consultants, sales reps and partners to communicate with their respective audiences, but it might be best for them to do it through an internal process for cohesion.
For example, your HR department may want to communicate to the employees of your organization via a specific web portal. However, the marketing department may not want the public face of the business to be able to see information on that portal. Consider who from your organization must speak to your audience via each platform to help make the decision.
4. Competitive Landscape
How are your competitors speaking to your target audience? As part of our strategic planning projects, we identify the personas alongside competitors of a business. This provides a better understanding of what a site visitor might see when searching for a solution.
Imagine you are a real estate developer that builds residential houses and leases commercial properties. You will want to evaluate the competitive landscape in your location for those very different services as separate lines of business. That way, you can better understand how to position your solutions toward those distinct audiences and set yourself up for success.
5. Search Engines
Google dictates very specific rules around the way a website should be architected. When building a website, it’s important to not only build it for your audience, but also for search engine bots that expect the information to be displayed, structured, described and coded a certain way. If you confuse the bots, they will not know how to show your results for a potential customer, thus impacting your search rankings.
Furthermore, subdomains, main domains and internal pages (even mobile variations) all get ranked differently, making it necessary to understand the impact that choosing the domain direction will have on your SEO.
6. Your Brand Story
Sometimes it becomes challenging to tell the story of what your business does in a holistic manner. Picture yourself as a financial advisor that provides wealth management, financial planning and tax preparation services, and you want to present your brand in a way that mirrors your services. You might then craft your brand to speak to your ability to control, manage and optimize finances across a person’s life, weaving together your multiple service lines.
In doing so, you can easily explain to a potential client why you offer the services you do and how you can help them solve their problem(s). If it’s hard for you to tell the story of why you offer a certain service, that service may distract a visitor while trying to get a full understanding of your brand. In that case, you may want to demonstrate that service separately, thus preventing brand confusion. In the same example, say that wealth management and finance planning company also offered life and auto insurance. The audience and way by which somebody searches for that information could be so different, so those services and information would belong on a separate website.
How do you handle multiple websites? It all depends. There’s no simple, straightforward, this-is-what-you-need-to-do answer. There is, however, a process in which you should better understand your audience, services, brand proposition and current data points to make an educated decision about your future digital marketing strategy.
Weighing these factors will help you create a plan for merging your sites, keeping them separate or spawning off new sites to speak to a unique audience.
