Owning multiple domains is becoming common practice in SEO—and this strategy could potentially do wonders for your rankings. Having multiple domains working together can boost your organic traffic and stabilize your visibility on the search results.
However, maintaining multiple websites can be a lot of work. It’s hard enough to push your main website to the top—and it’s even harder to do the same for a handful of different domains. This is why it is important to take a step back before applying this strategy. Evaluate whether it makes sense for you to take the multiple domain route. Is it the right direction for your website marketing campaign? Will you truly benefit from capturing two or more SERP spots consistently? These are some of the questions you should ask before signing up for multiple domain ownership.
The Zillow and Trulia Success Story
One of the best examples of multiple domain ownership success is that of Zillow and Trulia. Let’s have a look at what they did right, and how you could apply the same principles to your own campaign.
When Zillow bought Trulia a couple of years back, both of their websites have been doing amazingly well in organic searches. Both come up in the top 5 of the SERPs for relevant key terms such as (city x) + (real estate) or (city x) + homes for sale.
Most SEOs would recommend doing a 301 redirect when buying a second domain or combining entities to bring up rankings, but Zillow decided to keep the Trulia domain—and that decision worked extremely well. For Zillow, it was better to own two independently-ranking websites to consolidate everything under one domain.
This case is the perfect example of two already well-ranked domains coming together to dominate even a larger portion of SERPs. Zillow was wise to keep the Zillow and Trulia domains ranking separately because they got more clicks this way while minimizing risks, plain and simple. It made more sense to maintain the two separate brands than to try to push Trulia’s rankings into Zillow.
But Will It Work for You?
Like many SEOs who were inspired by the success of Zillow, you are probably starting to think about whether the same strategy can also benefit your website. The answer is, it depends.
Before making any commitment to purchase or start another domain, you need to ask yourself:
- Can you afford a multi-domain strategy, which can potentially cost a lot of time and money? Would your resources be better spent on improving your primary website’s marketing?
- Do you want two or more of the top ranking results to be yours for a specific keyword, or would you prefer 10 keywords you are ranking for to go up in rankings more broadly?
- Do you want to own multiple website and try to rank for as many different keyword phrases as possible? Or would you prefer owning one website and ranking for just a handful of keywords that you care deeply about?
You also have to consider your ability to get enough authority signals and link equity to rank all of your domains. Establishing link authority is difficult; in fact, it is the one of the hardest parts of the SEO process. This is why you have to think about whether it’s better to combine your efforts on all your domains by linking them up via redirects, or to keep them separate if they are already doing well on their own. If you have existing domains that are ranking well, perhaps keeping them separate to capture greater SERP real estate is the smarter direction to take.
To improve your chances of success, work with a seasoned search engine optimization company that can help you figure out the best strategies in capturing the SERPs with multiple websites. SEOValley has years of experience helping clients dominate their niches using the multiple-domain strategy. Sit down with our consultants and let’s discuss your options.
