One business having multiple websites is not a good thing.
We have been seeing more and more of this type of activity, especially when it comes to hiring companies to run Adwords or PPC campaigns. The keys to any successful Adwords campaign are not only optimized, well-researched keyword and ad development, but also well optimized landing pages for these ads to send traffic to.
We see the practice of creating multiple websites for one company all too often with some major players in the directory business running Adwords campaigns for their clients. What they do is create a separate site which is often just a one or two page “website” that acts as a landing page for the ads. (For example, if my main website is called CarsForSale.com and I am located in Littleton, CO, what these other companies like to do is create a new domain for this client and call it CarsForSaleLittleton.com.) These additional “websites” or landing pages will ultimately cause confusion – search engines (and users!) won’t know which one is the real one, and many times information (like a phone number) is different between the two sites.
It’s sort of like being given a fixed amount of air to fill a tire with air pressure. Think of the air as your SEO or search ranking and the tire as your website. If you fill one tire, you will inflate it to its ideal tire pressure and the tire will perform at its best. But if someone gives you second tire, you can only fill both tires part of the way and neither tire performs particularly well.
This is what will eventually happen to your website. If you have multiple websites, neither will be able to perform its best in search rankings. While multiple websites may be tempting to optimize pages for paid search, we are not a fan of this practice. We have reason to believe many website owners are now being punished for having these multiple websites and multiple web addresses for their business. The best way to go about this is to either better optimize the landing pages on your website, or create a custom landing page to drive your Adwords traffic to.
Read more about this topic in this article from Hubspot: Should I have multiple websites?
If you or your company has any questions about this topic (or anything else related to marketing for your business), don’t hesitate to contact me and our team online or call us direct at 303-703-8000.
