Dominating the SERP through multiple similar sites?
My client with multiple brands and a diverse family of products has historically been a direct mail company and recently changed their priorities to be multi-channel. Since their marketing strategy historically has been to buy up the competition and dominate the market by having "preferred shelf space", a top executive from the parent company has now proposed that the web strategy be to build a several product-specific websites (in addition to several branded websites) and dominate the market by having top positioned sites in search results. Is dominating the SERP even realistic?
In theory the strategy makes sense; however, there are numerous holes in the logic. Obviously, getting a site to appear naturally in the top 3 positions for a generally saturated market is NOT an easy task! Since they're new to the web, there's minimal stats to show that natural search is the primary source of traffic. (As a staunch supporter of inbound marketing, my strategic plan would not rely on such an assumption.)
Concerns:
- Resource allocation
- Building link popularity
- Duplicate content (blogs, promotions, product description, etc.)
- Interlinking site
- Realistic expectations
Understanding that the expectation of these executives is to claim the top positions in search results, what are your thoughts on additionally creating several product-specific sites (beyond a few brand sites) in effort to claim top spots? What are some key things to be aware of in executing such a campaign?
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I have some experience in this
Adrian Chira 2 years 38 weeks 6 days 23 hours ago
My former employer, one of the top 10 banks in the local market had a similar strategy and it worked. First I have to confess that I could not convince them to blog so the sites were more static in content. We developed sites for different types of loans and savings that were optimized for different sets of keywords. The strategy was that if we had the corporate site optimized for the bank name, the other ones were optimized for mortgages, consumer loans, banking for small business and different types of savings. In this way we succeeded to get on top positions with these sites while the main site was like an umbrella.
The other key to our success was that we worked a lot in building links. For example for the mortgages site we worked a lot with real estate agencies and agents as well as with the agents that sold mortgages. Also for the consumer loans we had a lot of links from the companies that sold white goods on credit.
The third thing that we have done was that we launched each site as part of an outbound campaign and we had a lot of exposure especially on TV.
For a small business I would not recommend the last part but for sure you will not face the same issues regarding blogging as we did.
Best Regards,
Adrian
I would create one top level
Brian Rogers 2 years 39 weeks 4 days 6 hours ago
I would create one top level domain and several sub domains (one for each product line). Therefore, you're still working to generate authoritay and ranking for 1 domain, buit you can have 3 distinct sites.
Now, if they have the resources, they could blog on each sub domain w/ remarkable content relevant to each product line. Therefore, each sub domain should be generating links, in turn making their overall site more and more powerful.
If they only have the resources for one blog, they could put the one blog on the top level domain and then reference and link off to the different product sub domains. If you do this, it will be very important to think about the audience of your blog. If they are blogging about several product lines, they might have several different audiences. In this case, they need to make sure the blog is easy to navigate so that audiences can find the content relevant to them. A blog without focus can easily fail, so be careful.