If you ask most website companies or SEO consultants, they’d tell you not to have two websites for the same business.
They’d tell you that having multiple websites would hurt your SEO, get you penalized by Google, and increase the resources needed to maintain your online presence.
These reasons would make sense in the ideal world in which your website is doing what it’s supposed to do – driving traffic and generating leads.
However, if you have an underperforming website, you may need to reconsider whether having a single website is going to benefit your business the most.
Google Doesn’t Care If You Have Multiple Websites
What Google doesn’t like is websites that are slow, have useless content, are not user-friendly, have poor navigation, use unencrypted HTTP connections, or provide poor mobile user experience.
Google doesn’t care how many sites your business has. All it does is crawl the websites, decide what’s most relevant for users based on a variety of factors, and rank those that are most useful highest in the search results.
If you have one website but it’s not optimized for a great user experience or delivering the content that’s helpful to your ideal customers, it won’t rank high in search results.
How can you know for sure what kind of website structure, content strategy, and SEO tactics are going to work best for your business and target market?
Here’s one way to find out…
Multiple Websites
If you have been using a vendor for over 10 months to help you with lead generation, SEO, and other online marketing tactics yet your website isn’t ranking well, attracting organic traffic from Google and Bing, or generating enough leads, then you should consider creating a second website.
Here’s why:
While a 10-month period is often long enough to test out an online marketing strategy, some tactics may take longer to generate results.
By creating a second website, you can let the strategy for the first website run its course while bringing in a second agency or consultant – essentially a competitor of your current SEO vendor – to test a different approach.
You should even be transparent about this and let the two SEO providers duke it out. Sure, you’d probably be spending more during the next 6 – 12 months to determine which vendor is more effective – but in the long run, there’ll be one sure winner…
… YOU!
The competition keeps the vendors honest and gets them to do their best to generate results for your business.
You see, many SEO vendors talk a good game and tell you they’re doing all the fancy stuff for your site. However, results talk louder than words. If their tactics aren’t placing you on the first page of Google, then they’re wasting your time and money.
Having a second website and letting your SEO marketers know that you’re putting their strategies to the test helps make sure they are doing everything they can to keep your business by producing maximum results for your business.
Yes, the SEO companies may complain. They’ll likely try to dissuade you from having two websites. There will be finger-pointing.
But here’s the thing – you don’t need to keep both sites once you have identified the winning formula that works for your business and target market.
Ignore the “cons” your vendors may be telling you for the next 6 – 12 months. If they’re complaining endlessly, then they simply aren’t confident about their ability to deliver outstanding results.
Losers complain while winners see opportunities, offer practical advice, and take action. Your goal isn’t to babysit marketers who whine but to identify the winner that will make your website profitable.
Let the results speak for themselves.
It may seem cruel but you’re in business to make a profit. You’re not here to get your SEO vendors to like you. If you stay with underperforming marketers, your competitors will squash you like a bug and laugh all the way to the bank.
You own your business and you call the shots. Set up the competition, find the best players, and let the champion take the spoil.
Make sure you track all the results, learn from both approaches so you can create a website that optimizes your ROI.
Ultimately, you’ll be the winner.