Join Peter Richman from Plug and Play as he tackles a common marketing dilemma: should you maintain multiple domains or consolidate them? Learn the key factors affecting this decision, including SEO impact, resource management, and audience targeting. Discover why larger websites often have greater pull for attracting links and traffic, and when maintaining separate domains might make strategic sense.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version! 

Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. I'm Peter Richman from Plug and Play, and today we're going to be talking about one domain or many. A common scourge of the marketing manager, one domain or many is a consideration that lots of businesses find themselves in. So whether you're a marketing manager, an SEO, or in digital marketing generally, you'll find that presented with this challenge from lots of businesses. Because perhaps that business has changed over time, perhaps it's acquired different brands, perhaps it's in different territories. Or maybe you've got a leviathan of a website right now and you're thinking about launching a new product or service, and maybe the business is just saying it's easier to have another website.

So let's get into the different pros and cons about why this might be a good idea or not. Well, lots of people starting off on the international offering front, whether the business maybe has different territories and different areas, they've got different websites with different top-level domain names. And over the years, that's actually served them quite well. So often we're talking to marketing managers who are saying, "Should I consolidate these into a single, non-geographic top-level domain, or do we retain all of these individual websites?" So we'll get into that.  

Sometimes businesses have multiple offerings with different target audiences serving different purposes. And actually that segmentation can actually play to their benefit from a conversion rate perspective and speaking to those audiences clearly. So again, "Should we keep separate websites, or should we merge them into one?" 

And that's really true of different brands as well. The brands piece and the multiple offerings piece really go hand in hand because, again, speaking to different audiences, different offerings, "How clear are we being? What does this mean from a Domain Authority perspective?" 

And then lastly, sometimes it's just the way that it's always been. We find that businesses have grown over time, and they're left in this scenario where they've got a wide-ranging ecosystem, and no one has really challenged the status quo before. 

So what should you do if you're faced with this dilemma? 

Well, actually, there's lots of influencing factors you need to consider from an SEO perspective. And the first one that I'll be talking about is audiences and messages. Although like from an SEO standpoint, there's a really clear argument to say, "What's your time and money resources?" When we're thinking about our resources from a time and money perspective, one website is typically cheaper to maintain, host, and manage than many. 

And actually, from a resource perspective, when you're thinking about generating inbound leads, inbound links, social equity, Domain Authority – having a single website for all of your resources, all of your efforts to be pulled in is going to increase your Domain Authority. Any Domain Authority you have from your previous domains brought in together is going to increase your number of links, your diversity of links, and likely your Domain Authority as well. 

So think of this as like how many horses and carriages do you have? And if you're going to put all your horses on one carriage, or you're going to continue to divide your horses across many carriages, at which point what's your kind of firepower for actually ranking for highly competitive search terms? So that's really the rub here. That's what we're trying to get to is, is this really worth that separation, or is it worth bringing them together? 

Audience and messages, though, from a non-SEO perspective is really a classical marketing 101 question. It's all good and well having a great Domain Authority. But is your website design and the audience user journey going to turn into conversions? Be that sales, bookings, leads, inquiries, and so on. And so I'd certainly consider saying that, from a marketing 101 perspective, audiences and messages is a great reason to have separate websites if those messages and those audiences are diverging as much as they might. 

From an SEO perspective, as I was saying, having a single domain makes way more sense. The argument here is simply that larger websites have greater gravity. They attract more links. They attract more visitors. Your resources can be pooled against that one carriage if you like. And so actually increasing your SEO equity is going to be much easier on one domain. 

From a team management perspective, we certainly find that different businesses have lots of different CMSs or copies of websites that they've generated over the years, and sometimes it's easier for those teams to manage those individual websites from an individual CMS. I mean, I would probably say that, from a team management perspective and from a financial perspective or just an ease of the way that perhaps it's always been done, that's really the tail wagging the dog. And I'd really encourage like marketing managers to consider marketing 101s as their primary consideration and their alignment with their target audiences and really think about the fact that pooling all of your resources together is likely to be cheaper in the long run, while at the same time giving you more Domain Authority through greater focus of your inbound link profile. 

So that's really all the considerations you need to think about. From a time and money perspective, you can really save money, and from a Domain Authority perspective, you can really go further and faster by having a single focus. 

So that's it. That's been Whiteboard Friday. Thank you for joining us.