Law firm wants two separate sites

[mrobby1]

My client is a new law firm that represents criminal and personal injury cases. They want one site for criminal defense and one site for personal injury. Both of these sites can be filled with a ton of unique content. It is two separate areas of law and two different client bases.

What I want to know is if this is bad for rankings? Will Google punish the sites?

Thanks

[EGOL]

I can understand why they think two sites would be a good idea.

Let's say you get two powerful sites up and ranking and someone searches for "Dewey Cheatem & Howe" and clicks into the wrong site.  They don't find what they are looking for and leave.  The result is that 50% of their brand name searches bounce.

Would BigAssLaw.com who has a very broad practice be a better website?   Let's say in the future they decide to do DUI or IP law... would they want four sites and have 75% of their visitors bouncing or still be using BigAssLaw.com that is a large firm with broad expertise?

[DennisSeymour]

No problem on Google's end. Just be sure you can handle both in terms of  SEO work. It usually boils down to that.

Some businesses eventually consolidate into a single site because of the amount of work involved for just 1 site...and some of them have 5-20+ sites

On the bright side, you can do a 301 eventually.

[DonnaDuncan]

Depends on whether you're doing organic SEO, local SEO or both.

From an organic perspective, I agree with EGOL and Dennis above, there are pros and cons to going either way. I think most would agree a single site is better because of the ability to consolidate your efforts into building a single brand and site equity.

From a local perspective, the same argument holds. You also need to bear in mind Google's requirements to not mislead people into thinking there are two businesses when there is only one. To have two approved local listings, you'd have to have two separate legal entities, with two separate and distinct business addresses, and two separate websites and local phone numbers.

[gowebsol]

I would be against separate websites. It would take so much more work to get the same results for two websites. Why dilute your domain authority? I'd put some real thought into the organization of the site and focus on needs based navigation that gets people quickly to the relevant content. Spend your time on crystal clear funnels for each audience, and constantly create and measure your content to hone in on the best results. Once you have a system in place, you'll be able to repeat the process over and over and create one powerhouse website.

Also, what about the local citation? Would you be using the same phone number and address, and if so, what site would you be linking to?

[N1ghteyes]

We have a couple of major law firms as clients who do exactly this, run one website for each sector that they operate in and then have a central corporate site.

At the end of the day Google wont penalize you so long as the content is unique.

[MiriamEllis]

Nice discussion going on here, with Egol making some very good points.

Personally, I am not a fan of the multi-site approach. It's the brand that needs to be built as the authority, for all of its services. And when it comes to Local, having shared NAP on more than one website can cause citation difficulties. So, again, this comes down to having a single authoritative source representing your business on the web. This tends to be the consensus of opinion on the Local SEO world - 1 site is better than 2.