New sister site VS site redesign and dangers of SEO dilution??

[genkee]

Hi I’ve got a site that is ranking #2 in my area for my chosen keyword but the site  is in need of an expansion and overhaul its only one page at the moment and to rank for more keywords its  need to be expanded.

Or another option is I  do own another domain and I was thinking of maybe instead of overhauling the new site launching that as a sister company aimed more at the corporate market, as my first site is a bit more alternative in domain name and content.

The thing is i'm not sure how this will affect my SEO they will be on the same CBlock and be offering similar services.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

The way I always try to explain this scenario, is imagine you are one of the many Google humans that check sites every hour of every day, what would they think if they came across both sites? Would they look at and decide that there was no reason to have a separate site when everything could be said on just one?

If the answer to that is "yes", then perhaps look to either include the new content in the existing domain, or if you feel you need a re-brand, then create the new site with the current pages and new pages, but 301 all current pages over to their new version on the new site.

What you could also look at is a subdomain of the current site. This always gives it a little more of an individual feel to the browsing experience and a separate domain that you can direct a different audience to.

-Andy

[dsinger]

If it were me, and I already had a site that ranked well, I would not want to interfere with that in any way.

I would probably advise rethinking your website architecture.  I would create a start page/homepage that invites all visitors to qualify themselves, i.e. click here for corporate business solutions, click here for personal solutions.  The created a subfolder for each experience (example.com/corporate & example.com/personal).  That way both subfolders can benefit from the link juice already built up for your existing site.  Also, make sure you 301 redirect any pages that currently rank well to their new url if it changes.  that way you dont lose any of the juice either.

alternatively, if you have no backlinks and completely want to start fresh, then yes, either a new domain for the corporate or a subdomain, such as corporate.example.com

[JaneCopland]

Agree with Brad and Andy here - if you can keep this content within the same site, expanding and perhaps restructuring what you already have, that would be better.

Some large corporates (think HSBC, Aviva, etc.) have a corporate site and a customer-facing site - and even then, it can get them into difficulty when the "wrong" site outranks the right one for certain content, like the brand name. In the case of big corporates, it's usually bad for business when a corporate site outranks the customer site, and this happens with annoying regularity to some of them. If it's possible to have all the content on one site, that site's home page is going to be virtually guaranteed to rank for brand terms, rather than there be a battle between a .com and a .co.uk, for example, for some queries.

If your current CMS does not have the capability of building a larger site on your domain, consider investing in a new CMS as long as it makes sense to host both types of content on the one domain / site.