Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site

[BobGW]

Hello,

We have a website to sell personal development trainings.

The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices.

What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?

[HiveDigitalInc]

The big opportunity would be to get all 3 sites to rank for primary keywords like personal development. Of course, this strategy will require 3 times the work

My guess is that the trainers are not prepared to do the work to get each individual site to rank, so it probably makes sense to join them all together. If, in a few months, you find out that you are producing tons of content, you can always peel off the sites with 301 redirects.

[irvingw]

"The big opportunity would be to get all 3 sites to rank for primary keywords like personal development. Of course, this strategy will require 3 times the work :-)"

also requires you to not get caught by Google or all three sites may get penalized for site spamming.

[AgentsofValue]

There was a fad a few years about doing microsites, where everyone was trying to create as many 'feeder' style sites as possible.  Lately, the trend has reversed, (Penguin / Panda) where the focus is more on creating a single great user experience and a brand associated with it.

In your case, 'personal development' and 'personal development training' could be considered as competitive, just based on the sheer number of ranking pages, and the number of advertisers for the 'training' keyword.

By putting the two blogs as subfolders (or even merging them into a single blog with 2 authors), you can expect to gain backlinks and build up social activity around your site at a much faster rate, compared to running them on separate blogs.

It potentially would be more fun for the blog authors as well, as there should be more readers and potential comments and discussion, and readers who follow one author stick around to join the discussion on the other blog authors posts.

So, I strongly vote for a single site / blog platform.  Of course, you may have to contend with some personal egos, to convince two people to share the same blog, but for SEO and ranking, it will produce much faster results.