Starting a Blog. New Domain vs integrated in a shop domain?

[fogar]

Hi everybody,

We are going to start a blog for posting about topics related to our online shop and its products.

Our question is... what is better in terms of SEO.... Creating it in a new domain and linking to our online store when neccessary, or integrating it in our actual online shop and take advantage of our visitors?

Thank you very much in advance!

Best Regards

[EGOL]

My retail site has a blog on the same domain.

I write how to use products, how to select them, how to maintain them.  Those pages link to the relevant product pages and the product pages link to relevant blog pages.

The blog pulls traffic from the SERPs and some of that traffic goes to the product page and buys something.

I value the blog posts based upon the number of conversions that they produce.  When I see something that works I make similar posts.

[ThompsonPaul]

Instead of the question being "what is better in terms of SEO?" the first question should really be "what it better for the users/readers/potential customers?", IMO.

If the blog is in fact going to be all about your online shop and its products, then it definitely seems the readers would find it makes much more sense for it to be integrated within the online shop site. That means it can be easily and sensibly integrated into the site's navigation (to better move readers to conversion pages when appropriate), share the rest of the site's look & feel to engender trust and identification, maintain a unified domain name so visitors can clearly understand how they're related, etc.

Fortunately, in addition, that arrangement also happens to be much better for SEO, as the two aspects of the site can work together to help each other's authority and ranking signals.

Risking a confusing user experience in the name of "better" SEO is pretty well always going to cause problems, especially as search engines algorithms continue to evolve to devalue such situations.

Paul

[fogar]

Thank you very much.

Yes, the first we have on mind is the user experience.

So I think the best is integrate it within our actual domain an design. That was our first option, but we didn´t know if that could be better or worse in SEO terms...

Thanks again to both!

Best Regards!