Should I host my Ecommerce Software in a Subdomain?

[Rybicki]

We have a single consumer product that we sell through traditional retailers and our website. We have used an ecommerce provider for our website since it's inception 6 years ago. The problem I am facing is website structure.

Our domain points to our ecommerce store, and therefore all content pages are created through the ecommerce platform. However, we can't really do a whole lot in terms of structuring URL's or sub domains. Basically, any content created is given an automatically created URL, and can only be fit in a pre-determined category. There is no way to use sub categories.

Are we better off for use and site structure to host the ecommerce portion of the site in a subdomain, such as store.domain.com, and then manually creating all of our content and other pages? I look at nest.com as sort of template for that. They too only have a few products, so a full ecommerce design isn't really necessary. Are we better off for SEO and ease of use to handle that separately from our overall website structure? Thanks for any help.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

At first blush, I'd say this: If I were you, I would host the content on a separate subdomain than your subdomain. I would want the freedom to choose a content management system/blog that gave me the freedom to aggressively pursue on-page SEO/content creation.

But to make sure we leave no stone unturned: do you have any pages in the storefront with SEO value that might make you think twice about jumping to the subdomain?

[Rybicki]

Thanks for the response.

We currently use a subdomain for a blog, because we could not host the blog within the ecommerce software. That is blog.domain.com, and we use that for some content marketing.

Our product line is in the health category, and naturally has quite a few components to it that are worth creating basic content about. We are looking at doing a sort of an A-Z guide that we can host directly on the website, and not the blog.

We do not have any content that would be affected by moving the ecommerce software to a subdomain. We have very few pages that have utilized the ecommerce package's url structure, and any pages that do use it, are ones that have little SEO value. We would like to improve the amount of original content with our main domain along with our blog.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

No problem! Yeah, having a more flexible content management software (i.e. blog/website) with more control sounds like it would make it much easier to optimize the content, url's, and on-page aspects of your SEO.

Do you have any other reservations on this topic?