MULTIPLE DOMAINS
Strategic Reasons to Own Multiple Domains
Owning multiple domains isn’t just about catching traffic or protecting your brand. You can use additional keyword domains to serve specific purposes for your business.
Marketing And Advertising Campaigns
If you already have a core domain name for your business, and you want to run a marketing or ad campaign, you’ll need to track customer behavior to measure success.
Using domains specifically for your promotional campaigns, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads, is a smart way to know exactly where the traffic originated and how you acquired a customer. It’s particularly useful when advertising a domain name via a non online channel where a customer cannot click on a URL, such as a magazine or radio ad.
Having different domains for your landing pages or your marketing lets you track your performance while keeping your content separate.
Sales And Landing Pages
If you want to send traffic to a specific section of your website, an effective tactic is to use a descriptive keyword domain with an easy to remember URL to point to a particular page on your site. For example, instead of saying, "go to XYZproducts.com/shop/sale/clearance", why not use the domain XYZproducts.sale to drive customers to your hot promotions?
SEO Search Engine Optimization
For SEO purposes, companies with various brands that cater to different audiences often take advantage of owning specific domains for each. If you have a keyword strategy in mind for your individual brands, having an individual domain for each one will help you take up more “real estate” in search results.
Attracting Local Searchers
A popular way to implement this strategy is to use 301 redirects. By doing this, you’ll be able to permanently redirect your secondary domains to your primary domain. With redirects, all of the rankings from the secondary domains to your primary one will boost overall rankings in search.
Before You Purchase Multiple Keyword Domains
Before buying multiple keyword domains, consider what purpose they will serve for your business. From marketing to SEO to legal considerations, there are many reasons to own several domains. The key is having a clear game plan for each one. With a good strategy in place, you’ll be well positioned to make multiple domains work for you.
Administrative
At a minimum, you’ll want to take steps to centralize the management of all domain names, so there’s a running list of what domains you own, renewal dates, logins and other important information.
Pro Tip: Buying all your domains from one registrar and on the same purchase date makes renewal easier. Keeping your invoices in one place makes it simpler to keep track of costs and taxes.
SEO Concerns And Care
When you have multiple domains with associated websites, you need to avoid having duplicate content on these sites as this could hurt your SEO. Duplicate content often leads to a loss in rankings and traffic because search engines don’t know what content to index, exclude, how to direct the link or what version to show in search results. Make sure content is unique on each of your websites to avoid this issue.
Potential Confusion
If you’re using multiple domains, you might confuse your customers. They may not be sure which of your domain names they should go to. If you use multiple domains, think carefully about how they’re being used, so you’re not making things more complicated than they need to be for your customers.
Pro Tip: Consider setting up website forwarding (301 redirects) on some of your key domains in order to address potential confusion or SEO concerns. Website forwarding is a good idea if you buy multiple variations of your name to protect your brand and you want a customer or prospect to find their way to your main site when they go to the domain.