: Two related business (plant nursery & garden designer), same owner. One website or two? I hope this question is not too specific to be answered here. The situation is that a husband and wife

@Rambettina238

From a business perspective, should the day come that they want to sell one of the businesses, it'll be much easier to show the specific interest in business a/b if they have separate websites.

From a design/ux perspective, are there any benefits/shortfalls that they can gain from having their customers associate the two services together? I'm sure there's a reason that the two businesses are seperate entities so why present them together now? Also, what sort of brand do they want to represent? Can that be achieved sufficiently over one site or would it be better to have them separated?

From an SEO perspective it's better having a larger site with a wider subject area. But if they're a local business, having a small site won't necessarily work against them as all of your competitors will likely have small sites.

In terms of costs, they're going to be paying for each page to look/act a certain way (assuming they want to keep the businesses separated visually on the site) so I can't see how this amounts to extra money in real terms other than paying for the extra server space/advertising.

Sorry, not many answers in there but I don't know much about your product. Hopefully, these questions can put you on the right track and get you thinking about some of the issues that they should consider.

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@Gretchen104

From a pure SEO perspective, start both businesses on the same website, because it takes content and size to rank. By starting together, they will support each other in attracting traffic which might be coming for one reason and be interested in the other.

It is ok to have two phone numbers too, one for each service. Users won't complain if they are satisfied in their queries. They won't complain because these are not separated websites.

If necessary, you can always spin one activity on another domain name later and use proper redirects to pass the link juice between each site and keep the accumulated SEO benefits so far.

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@Eichhorn148

It partly depends on whether you might want to sell the businesses separately. If the two businesses have a mixed website, you couldn't sell the business separately and have the website go along with it.

Also see this very similar question from somebody who asks about a funeral home and several cemeteries: Can different properties be on multiple domains or should everything be centralized on one?. To quote some of my advice from that question:


Google allows webmasters and business to own multiple domains with different content and have them appear in the search results. However, Google does frown upon "networks of sites" if they get large or spammy. You could cross into bad territory if:


Your websites have pretty much the same content with just keywords changed
Each site has little content, but links to all the others
The number of sites grows too large to be easily manageable (I'd say 50 sites would be the max.)
The only reason to have multiple sites is to rank higher in search engines.


Google's Matt Cutts has a video about this issue. He says that similar sites owned by the same owner can exist and can link to each other, as long as you don't go overboard.

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@Annie201

It depends on your clientsthe segments you serve as service provider. What do they expect from a professional or from an agency? Do they need both or they just need one? I'm not talking about "state of the industry" or "average", but I'm talking about the specific peoplesegmentniche you want to serveprovide your service.

It's more about marketing. If for example your profitable niche is expecting just a garden designer and not a plant nursery service, why combine the two websites? Your message and value proposition would be less powerful and generic. And you should do anyway different webpages for different set of keywords if people never search both in a single search hit to Google.

So you should do competitive intelligence and some keyword research to understand that better.

You can also try both projects doing campaigns on AdWords, using just landing pages and not entire websites.

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@Nimeshi995

I do not know your businesses, however, I would think that there is overlap in the keywords used which would make for a stronger performing site if combined as one site. As well, it is far easier to maintain a single site. It is not uncommon for a single site to contain more than one offering or division.

I am not sure if you are operating as two separate businesses with two separate addresses, phone numbers, etc. If the addresses are the same and possibly even the same phone number, then I would assume that confusion could be kept to a minimum using a single site.

There are advantages in having two sites, however, coming up with enough content for each site to make each one perform well would be a challenge. You would be dividing the effort into two sites and having unique content between sites would be more work. Keep in mind, that content, not just a business listing, is really required to capture search traffic. Yes. Local search is important, however, having two sites can limit what search terms each site is able to capture. The more content, the merrier.

I imagine a single site with a fair amount of common content, plants names, care, growth regions, cost, etc. You can have both offerings on this site and use mark-up for the address, phone, and e-mail addresses, etc. to make things a bit easier.

I used to deal with a large gardening center and landscaper as a customer when I lived in another area with one website. There is overlap. People would go buy plants and what not because they like to garden and then ask about landscaping prices and schedule work to be done because not everyone can take on the whole task.

Remember that simple is always best. Do not over-complicate things or over-think things. Do a good simple job on your website and offer as much as you can. Good will goes a long way. Becoming a resource site will help to drive search traffic and potential customers. Focus on what your customers want you to do but also what they want to do for themselves. You never know what a person is thinking on the web. They may search for one thing, but have other things in mind too.

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