Creating a new site for each department of your business. Thoughts?

[DCochrane]

What is everyone's thoughts on creating several websites for your business for each department.

For example.. say you owned a car dealership.

You create a different site for:

• New cars for sale
• Used cars for sale
• Service department -mechanical repairs
• Parts & accessories department
• Financing department

Positives:

Having separate sites for each department would probably make it easier  to rank on the specific search terms. Since a whole site on one topic Ie. Used cars would rank over just a page with the same information on a dealership website.

Negatives:

• You would have to maintain 5 sites
• Link building
• Social Media
• Analytics
• ETC.
• Since they are all new domains & sites it will take longer for each site to rank.
• Google will see them as small lower authority sites since they are only a few pages & not larger sites.

What is everyone's thoughts on this? Would you create several small sites? Or would you continue working on one big main authority site & continue link earning to the specific department pages, blogging on the topics etc.

Thanks for any help & opinions!

[VentaMarketing]

It looks like you have laid out all of the positives and negatives very well. You seem to have a good understanding of SEO and of what each plan requires.

A few years ago, the several website model for one business was a widely used SEO tactic, but in my opinion it is not as strong as it used to be. Since exact match domains are not as effective any more and link quality is so important, I would recommend one website.

Also, the search terms you want to show up for are most likely competitve. You can not just build a website with good title tags and header tags and expect to show up. You will need great links for each website.

My advice would be to build one website, but create a separate link building plan for each department. When you build a link for a certain department link to that department's subpage. This will build your domain authority while also giving your website more value because of the deep inbound links.

Also, in my opinion, you will build a stronger brand with one website.

[donford]

The brand is what I would focus on; opposed to trying to deal with that many sites under a single industry umbrella.

The2 big things in your negatives (Link Building, Social Media) for 5 sites is enough to deter me from thinking any further about it. Then again I'm a tad old school, I would much rather focus on delivering an exciting user experience that users like so much they talk about it. Today that impacts Social Media, before the bird and book, it generated links via forums, emails, and blogs.

My thoughts,

Don

[Sean_Dawes]

I would not. Just build different sections of the site. An example of this would be an effective online retail store in automotive which has numerous makes/models under one roof. It can be done effectively, you just need to build out a good wireframe.