SEO Benefits of One Site vs. Multiple Sites

Developing an SEO strategy that optimizes both your brand and community locations in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is paramount to your company’s digital marketing success. Whether your company operates three communities or 50+ communities, it’s important that you implement an SEO strategy that allows you to maximize your visibility and rankings in the SERP.

Search Engine Optimization experts (who also call themselves SEOs) know there are many important aspects of optimizing a website for Google’s 100+ variable ranking algorithms. SEO-friendly code, consistent Meta data, keyword-rich content, inbound-links, reviews and social indicators, just to name a few. However, even before keyword research begins, marketers should consider how the brand would be optimized across one or multiple sites.

Many times, small- to medium-sized providers develop websites for each community location. From a purely SEO perspective, it’s an uphill battle for these sites to rank successfully for anything other then the community’s brand name and geolocation. Most single-community sites have a tough time leveraging brand, content, and inbound links, thus having little to no domain and page rank authority which limits their search potential.

Brand

There has been a lot of recent debate on how Google manually and algorithmically favors brands. Most SEOs agree that if you’re not building a strong brand, you will struggle with effective search marketing. Many believe it’s better to optimize a brand on a single site and domain – not for User Experience (UX) and conversation optimization – but to maximize search potential.

Content

Content is still “King.” In order for any site, large or small, to rank in the SERP results for any keyword, short or long-tale, it needs tons of keyword-rich copy. Developing well-optimized content for multiple sites can be challenging, both from a cost and content management standpoint. SEOs know you can’t just post the same blog or article to each community site (especially when sites are closely linked) without risking duplicate content penalties and low Page Rank.

Inbound Links

Generating quality inbound links (Page Rank 5/10 or higher) is a crucial SEO strategy. A good inbound-link strategy goes beyond just linking your sites together, it’s driving quality inlinks from other sites with similar content with high Page Rank. Like content development, inbound-link development can be costly and time intensive. Soliciting and acquiring quality inbound links to a single site and domain is much more effective than trying to drive inlinks to multiple sites and domains, which could dilute your SEO link juice.

Bottom line: Can you develop a successful local SEO strategy based on multiple sites and domains? Yes. However, if you’re looking for a holistic SEO strategy that includes local and organic search optimization, think about combining multiple sites and domains into one single optimized brand site. Your users and conversion rate will thank you.

We Would Love to Hear from You!

If you have comments or questions on the use of one site vs. multiple sites, we would love to hear from you. We also encourage you to share any experiences you have had in this area, whether they have been successful or not. Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.