While creating multiple websites, a lot of business people’s intentions are purely focused on maximizing their profits. As a result, some companies own numerous domains that that are mainly set to redirect to the main site.
Often times, people tend to believe that the more the number of websites, the better the chances of being found online by the target audience.
Although a lot of these people’s intentions are mainly pure, what they do not know yet is that they could be setting up a death trap for their precious businesses. Nevertheless, we also have to agree that everything has a good side when scrutinized at a personal level.
Advantages of having several websites for your business
- When the multiple websites target different countries
When structuring international websites, businesses should take several things into consideration. One of the commonest option is creating multiples sites with a country’s code domain. For example, France uses a top-level domain of www.wbay.fr. Once every country employs a different domain, search engines automatically treat them as separate domains.
- Several websites help in dominating the search results
Although this technique is rarely used by businesses, a lot of popular companies have proven that several websites keep them at the top of search results. This is common especially after implementing the multiple domain strategy. Google allows two results per domain, thus elevating the chances of these top websites to acquire more clicks.
Although this has been proven to work, the main question that should be answered by every business is whether they are ready to pump resources for concurrently running two websites that have to rank in the first page on each search engine. If your one website is not in the first page, maybe you should critically question the possibility of having two sites on the first page as well.
Disadvantages of having several websites
- Time and effort
This is one of the main reasons against having multiple websites as it turns out to be resource-intensive. When it comes to creation of content, optimizing the pages, and securing SSL certificates, one will have to work double. This is because after a few years, one is required to change the sites’ designs and make several updates as well. When you have more than one website, this could dig deeper into your pockets.
On the other hand, one has to understand that for a site to grow, external links must be created. These ranks helps one is climbing the ladder of getting ranked higher on search engines.
However, if one has several websites, there is a requirement to double the efforts in creating more building links. In the end, one ends up focusing on multiple sites rather than channeling all the efforts to a single website.
- Customer confusion
Generally, a business with multiple websites might end up paying more attention to one and in the end forget about some. This might be brought about by confusion that erupts when the mind is divided. The same case also happens to your customers; they may view all the websites but be unaware of whether they are reading about the same business.
Several people make the mistake of setting up several websites, selling the same products, but offering inadequate information about the same. This may confuse the user as there is no guarantee that they will find the right site to view the remaining information.
As such, one is advised to channel all their efforts in building a primary site with all the information that a customer needs, rather than distributing shallow sentences into different websites.
- Name address phone (NAP) consistency
In several instances, some people have a single business in one location but end up setting several websites for the same. They end up filling the same address and phone number in these websites. However, there is need to note that this may have a negative effect in your ranking and more so when it comes to confusing your users on your personality.
For Google to validate the location of your business, an individual is required to provide consistent NAP details. This is because shortcuts will never lead one up the ranks.
- Duplicate content
The problem with having multiple websites is that one ends up duplicating some content is these websites. This is especially a blow for most small businesses as they may not have a lot of things to tell their customers. In such instances, the second and third websites are more of ‘spinning’ content from the original site.
Other than measuring your SEO efforts as guided by keyword.com, content plays a vital role when it comes to ranking of your business. Unfortunately, duplicated content may not meet this criteria.
- Difficulty in tracking
Once you have multiple domains for your business, it turns out difficult tracking and managing the sites. The problem comes in when people fail to capture some valuable insight as well. The main issue is that the website indicates itself as a referral rather than showing its originality.
What is the way forward?
There is no condemnation is you already have multiple websites, or you are considering to build some. However, ask yourself this question; is it really necessary having more than one site for the same business? In case your answer is blurred, then the best solution to end this menace is merging all or some of your domains to form a manageable number of sites like one.
Although there are many legitimate reasons to believe that several domains could connect you to more of your targets, then the other question to meditate on is whether you have enough resources to make all the sites effective and profitable. For bigger companies, it is likely that they might have more money and stuff to operate several websites.
However, for smaller organisations, it is unlikely that they may have floating money to channel to these domains. As a result, it turns out that the only way forward would be creating one strong domain that would be beneficial to the business. Picking a single but sure path might be the only way to survive in this competitive world!
