Domain: Product brand or company brand?

[hoosteeno]

I work for a company with a very strong brand. We have a product with an even stronger brand. Right now, our product marketing pages look like this:

https://www.company.com/product/....

I believe this leads to URL bloat, and I think we're probably missing some search rank on product-branded keywords that we would automatically get if, instead, our product marketing was here:

https://www.product.com/....

An example of this structure is Colgate Palmolive (http://www.colgatepalmolive.com/en/us/corp), the makers of Colgate toothpaste (http://www.colgate.com/en/us/oc/).

We already own both domains, but of course right now SEO rank is entirely owned by company.com.

If we put product marketing at product.com, of course the company site can still link to the product site anywhere, and vice-versa, which means (I think) that both domains help each other out. But we wouldn't have to spend as much time worrying about the branded keyword in product content.

I have found some posted opinion that tends to support my hunch here, but I haven't seen anything more concrete in support of it. Has anyone got direct experience with this question?

[Hurf]

While I don't have any direct experience to offer, I can absolutely see the benefit of separating product and company - but only if the product is big enough to justify standing alone - it makes perfect sense when considering the example you give, but that's right at the top end of the scale.

However, I see no issue whatsoever with "URL bloat". The URL hierarchy:  https://www.company.com/product/.... is very well understood and in common usage with good reason: Categories (and sub-categories) in your URL allows you to reference keywords in the URL as well as giving the visitor a better understanding of what they can expect.

Typically, when you're offering thousands of products across hundreds of categories, you'd want your URL hierarchy to  something like domain/category/sub-category/product. This allows you to bring maintain logical order and demonstrate the value of the product/service/information you're presenting, by positioning it further up the hierarchy. Millions of stores perform famously using this structure. I can see you've already considered this, but I wouldn't have any concerns about losing visibility with a domain/category/product structure. So, if you were only doing this because you were concerned about losing visibility for your product due to this fear of the product being diluted at the end of the URL, the example you gave isn't going to cause it.

If the product is as strong as you state and you want this to be the company's star performer, which justifies it's own space, then go for it -  but do it because it needs it rather than a fear of losing visibility.

You could always follow this example:

http://www.apple.com/iphone-7/

This works pretty well and you get the added benefit of  raising awareness of company brand (and) /product.

If you do decide to relocate your product (elsewhere in the company site or to a new domain) with careful planning, you can roll it out using 301 redirects to guide searches to the new location (https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo)  and rel=canonical tags  - if you're using the same content across both sites (https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization). This, alongside your other marketing efforts should enable you to transition from company to product site without any real risk of losing visibility.

Good Luck!