Does having multiple domains help or hurt your SEO?
Let’s go for the Featured Snippet! Cannibalization can be a big problem for SEO performance if you have multiple domains.
It doesn’t have to be, though.
There are many strategies that multiple domains can use to improve each other’s SEO, and I will mention some of them as I go. I would like to thank my colleague Rachel Anderson for her contributions to this piece. Rachel is our Sr Director of Web Intelligence and she has helped to make this article what it is.
This article will focus on the problems with multi-site SEO strategies.
Why A Business Might Use Multiple Domains For SEO
There are many legitimate reasons for a business to have multiple websites. Common reasons include:
Businesses with multiple brands.
For example, SC Johnson owns Windex, Pledge, and a host of other brands that all would benefit from having their own domains. A good way to differentiate between two brands is to have each one target a different audience.
Businesses that target multiple countries.
For example, OLX has classifieds businesses in Portugal, India, and Brazil, each with its own ccTLD. There are two main advantages to having a country-specific domain name: SEO and branding.
Businesses that grow via acquisition.
The website usually comes with the company when you buy it. This can either present an opportunity for growth by expanding your reach, or an SEO challenge that can come from cannibalization and/or confusion for search engines.
Multi-location businesses.
It is not uncommon for a national brand, particularly franchises, to have a separate website for each physical location or territory. This often leads to local sites competing with the national brand’s site for ranking in the SERPs.
Businesses that want to dominate the SERPs.
Some companies try to get multiple sites that they own or control to appear in the same search results for various queries. This may be done through acquisitions or by developing the sites themselves.
This can work well, but there are times when it does not.
Common SEO Problems For Businesses With Multiple Domains
We often see two primary challenges in SEO for businesses with multiple websites:
Supporting multiple sites is a royal PITA and can be expensive.
Each site will need separate teams for front and back end development, as well as ongoing maintenance. They will also need designers and UX experts, and investments in SEO content, backlink acquisition, and new features.
ROI demands increase as investments grow, as does the need for staff to support the investment.
If a client asks about a multi-domain strategy, we often advise them that it’s usually less effort/investment to get a single domain ranking well than to get multiple domains ranking well for a similar amount of search queries.
Cannibalization.
When we work on businesses that have multiple sites and are seeing a decline in organic traffic and revenue, it is often clear that the sites are negatively impacting each other’s SEO performance.
There are a number of reasons this could be the case, but the most common one we see is when the sites have the same data/content. This is the kind of thing that makes Google choke.
How To Analyze The SEO Performance of Multiple Domains
1. Aggregate Your Data
It is helpful to be able to see all of the data for multiple domains in one place when trying to analyze SEO performance. If you want to see data from Google Search Console in one place, you will probably need to create a data warehouse. This will allow you to use the GSC API to collect data from each domain.
2. Segment Domains By Page Type
You can get an idea of where the issues are by looking at the overall domains, but it’s really important to do a page-level analysis to figure it out.
Right now, you should decide which types of pages there are on each website and put them into different groups so we can tell which groups are doing worse than others.
3. Build A Robust Keyword Set
You will need to be able to look at your page/site data at the keyword level once it is set up. The number of keywords you use will depend on the size of your target market and domain.
The keywords were distributed among the domains as follows: We used a 2M-word keyword corpus for a recent project with 6 domains that were targeting overlapping search queries in major U.S. cities. The keywords were distributed among the domains as follows:
We were able to see how well the local versions of these websites were doing in all of their markets, which allowed us to see how well the websites were doing overall. This left plenty of keywords available to see how the websites were doing for national searches.
This can be a list of terms that you think are relevant to your business, We create a large keyword list by starting with a seed list consisting of terms relevant to our business.
We exported all of the non-brand keywords from Google Search Console for each domain via the GSC API and applied them to the top 1,000 U.S. metro areas with various popular local queries.
If you want more words from GSC, you’ll need a process for expanding your keyword corpus. You can find the keywords your competitors are targeting using various tools, such as SEMRush or Keywordtool.io.
4. Classify Your Keywords By Topic
Once you have your keyword list, you’ll want to group the terms into topics.
After analyzing a set of search queries, it is more important to look at how your pages perform for a specific topic across each domain, rather than the performance of individual keywords.
A page targeting the keyword phrase “multi-domain SEO” could rank for hundreds of different, relevant queries.
Classifying a large number of keywords can be difficult. There are many tools available that can help with developing a keyword list, but they will only get you part of the way there.
To find which phrases are used most frequently, you can run the keywords through an n-gram tool. However, if the topic is not clear from the keyword, this will not be helpful.
You wouldn’t know that a Ford F-150 was a truck just by looking at the words. I strongly suggest that you invest in a machine learning methodology that can help you classify related keywords.
If you want to rank higher than your competition in Google, it is helpful to know what they are doing. That’s where SEO competitor analysis tools come in.
You can use SEO tools to find out how well your competitors are ranking for their target keywords, who is linking to them, which of their pages are driving the most traffic, and much more. Now, let’s get started!
The Best SEO Competitive Analysis Tools
#1 – SE Ranking
Although SE Ranking is most commonly used as a rank tracker, it also has access to a large database of competitor’s backlinks and keywords. This makes it a useful tool for research purposes. I found that it picked up more keywords than Ahrefs by a significant margin.
The user interface is very straightforward to use. To begin, go to the Competitive Research tab and enter your domain name.
Scroll down to your Organic competitors list to see a breakdown of all the websites that compete with you for ranked keywords, ordered by their visibility.
You can access the websites of any of these competitors by clicking on their names in the Competitive Research report. You’ll be able to see a lot of information about their SEO and PPC performance from there. You can quickly see how much traffic a site is getting, whether it is organic or paid, and how much value that traffic has. You can also see how many keywords the site ranks for.
The Domain Trust and Page Trust metrics will let you know how authoritative the site is and if you will be able to compete.
If you want to see the keywords they rank for in a specific region, you can change the settings to filter data by country or continent.
And that’s just the basic stuff. You can choose to analyze ranking changes over time, SERP features, top pages by traffic share, and so on if you want to investigate further.
Try the Backlink Checker tool to see your competitor’s backlinks. In minutes, you can generate a report of all the backlinks the site has, along with the domain name and web page where each link originates.
You can improve the quality of your backlinks by filtering them by Domain Rank, which is a measure of website authority. The most valuable backlinks will come from high-ranking domains, so add them to your link-building prospect list.
In addition to conducting competitive research, SE Ranking can also be used to audit your website, optimize your on-page content, find keyword suggestions, track your rankings, and more.
#2 – Semrush
Semrush is an enterprise-level SEO software solution. This is the best competitive analysis tool for people who want to improve their ranking in search engines.
Semrush is a true all-in-one marketing platform. The software provides over 40 tools to help with optimizing all areas of your marketing campaign, including SEO, PPC, SMM, and content marketing.
The competitor analysis toolkit is built-in and is divided into four tools: Organic Research, Advertising Research, Social Media Tracker, and Traffic Analytics. These tools give you a complete understanding of your competitor’s digital marketing strategy.
The Organic Research feature shows you which keywords your competitors are ranking for and how valuable they are. There’s also a tool that lets you compare multiple competitors at once to discover gaps in their SEO strategy.
The Advertising Research feature provides the insights you need to improve your paid search campaigns and beat your rivals. Unpick their PPC strategy and analyze their ad copy.
The Social Media Tracker helps you see what is being effective on your social media accounts. A social media scheduling tool is also included.
The Traffic Analytics feature is Semrush’s answer to Similarweb. This tool allows you to collect extensive data about your competitor’s website, including monthly traffic, where their traffic is coming from, bounce rate, and how long users stay on the site. You can then compare your own website’s performance to these metrics. If you want to do more than just analyze organic search traffic, this paid add-on is a good investment.
#3 – Serpstat
Serpstat is an integrative platform that allows users to access comprehensive research features along with other powerful tools for SEO. It has a great selection of backlinks and keywords at a great price.
You can start using SE Ranking by entering your website URL into their domain analysis tool. Then, you can view your Competitors report to find out who your biggest SEO opponents are.
To analyze your competitor’s SEO performance, find their domain and run a report. All of the important data, such as traffic estimations and ranked keywords, can be seen quickly and easily.
You can find more information about the search terms they rank for by opening up a more complete Keywords report. Find the best opportunities by using filters to sort through them.
This runs a simple side-by-side comparison of your site with the competition. We also liked the Domain vs Domain tool, which does a side-by-side comparison of your site and the competition. SEO Visibility Explorer lets you compare the SEO visibility of multiple competitor websites at the same time.
#4 – BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is the best content marketing platform available. This is a toolkit that content marketers can use to find the content that their competitors are sharing the most.
To use BuzzSumo, simply search for a keyword or domain to see a list of the most popular content from that topic.
You can see how many backlinks, shares, and social media engagements each piece of content has on different networks alongside it. The top sharers for a given competitor can be identified in order to discern which influencers that competitor is working with. This, in turn, can be used to inform one’s own outreach strategy.
You can use the Discover tool to find new article topics, using BuzzSumo’s extensive index.
#5 – Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a popular all-in-one SEO platform. Moz is one of the most popular SEO software platforms Moz is a platform that big brands use because its SEO crawler is active and its backlink and keyword databases are large. However, it’s extremely expensive compared to other tools.
Ahrefs is a great toolkit—I can’t deny that. Although it is still considered the best option for SEO and competitive analysis, other platforms have begun to improve and may eventually overtake it.
I put Ahrefs far down on this list because a lot of people are angry with them because of their new billing policy. They have recently changed their pricing system so that any overages are automatically billed. The company now only offers 500 monthly reports, regardless of which $999/month plan you are on.
Ahrefs is a great platform with a lot of features, but it’s not worth the price compared to other platforms.
The above tools all offer free trials, so if you’re not sure which one is right for you, you can try them out without committing to anything. Both Semrush and BuzzSumo have free plans, but they are limited.
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