SEO: Using your additional domains to build Search Engine Optimisation

You've launched your new business at businessname.com and are ready to commence your marketing. As part of this, you have purchased businessservice1.com and businesservice2.com in an effort to capture virtual real estate relating to your business. However, duplicating content across these domains (by running the same website for these domains) can actually do more harm than good for your organic search results. Here's a few tips on what you CAN do to ensure you gain the benefit from your additional domains.

Why Have Additional Domains

Additional domains can be a great way to protect your virtual real estate. Capturing the name of a product/service in a domain can ensure that you are associated with that product/service online. In addition, domain name URLs score very well in organic search engine results.

However, often once the domain name is acquired, little is done to make the most of the "real estate" associated with the domain.

The Default Action: Duplicating Content Across Domains

More often than not, when a business has more than 1 domain, they point all their domains to their single website. Ultimately this is an easy way to divert traffic from all these domains to a single point of maintained content. However the downside is that in the eyes of search engines, your content is now duplicated across a number of sites.

This duplication of content can often reflect poorly on your businesses visibility in search results.

SEO Issues of Duplication

Duplicated content is seen as SPAM to search engines. And as such, they are likely to penalise you in search engine rankings for doing so.

So despite your best efforts to optimise your website content, your extra domains will be working against you - and you will negate any additional benefit of using these domains with keywords.

However, there are some simple steps you can take to separate the content across these domains and improve your overall search engine rankings.

The Alternative - Brochure Websites

Creating separate brochure websites on each domain can be a great way to manage content across multiple domains. Ensuring unique and quality content on each domain, and then linking the content of these domains together can have a great impact on your businesses visibility in search engines.

For example - your main website information would exist on businessname.com. However on businesservice1.com, you would generate content around that specific business service and then link back to businessname.com for further information. In doing so, not only are you creating a great presence for your business service, you are also building meaningful content about your business and related services online for search engines.

While this may sound like duplicating your efforts, (and alot of additional effort), it can often be alot easier than you think to get started.

Getting Started

The best way to proceed with this strategy is to maintain a main website that contains the vast majority of your content. This will be the main source of information for your business and the cornerstone for your online presence.

The next step is to then establish smaller "satellite" sites for each additional domain - ensuring the continuation of the branding/theme of your business but with a focus specific to the product/service associated with that domain. Then, link the content from this site back to your main domain.

The satellite sites can often start as single-page websites and can often link sections of content from your main site - to ensure that they stay current. But having a unique structure and more prominent calls to action can have significant impacts on SEO and user interaction.

To find out more about how your business is performing in Search Engines, or to discuss more about what can be done to improve your businesses SEO, Contact Us today. We can assist you in building a strategy for SEO, running SEO reports on the "visibility" of your business online and then developing & optimising your website for search engines and social media

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