One big site or several smaller ones

As far as SEO goes, which will work better?

[kovets]

I have a a brick and mortar "[snip]" stores, and I am looking to bring my business online - I am having trouble deciding on building several individual "[snip]" sites each specializing in one particular brand, or one site selling all five brands I carry.

From a marketing prospective, the [snip] would work better for us - our "[snip]" are very expensive and we think people will be more likely to purchase from a store that specializes in one particular brand.

Obviosly, if they can't find us, it doesn't matter what we sell so SEO is king.

Here are my thoughts - since we are selling such a specialized product, we will have very few important keywords. Our customers are interested in a particular brand and will more likely search for "[snip]" than for "[snip]" or "[snip]". The [snip] site idea will benefit from this I think.

Each of our sites will link to each other - from my limited research, this is important. However, the sites will share a shopping cart and MAY share an IP. (On a side note, is this a bad idea?) Will the spiders eventually figure this out?

Of note, one of our biggest competitors use the "[snip]" idea and are consistently ranked by Google in the top 4 for all their products.

My question then is which method (one site or many) should I focus on? The few SEO firms I have talked with seem to think the one big site would work better for SEO. My instincts tell me otherwise.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Steve

[edited by: pageoneresults at 7:06 pm (utc) on Nov. 10, 2003]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics [/edit]

[Receptional]

An age old question. (well - "age" is relative on the Internet).

My advice would be first look at the cost of buying your way to the top using PPC on your very specific keyphrases. If it only costs 15 cents per visitor and you are selling $100 handbags then I don't care which way you go, PPC will make you the money.

[kovets]

I looked into this ... unfortunately PPC is used by many sites and is very expensive right now.

Thx

Steve

[pageoneresults]

You could go either way with this approach; one site covering all products or, multiple sites targeting each product. I've done both and have had success using both approaches.

It seems that the general trend these days is to build one all encompassing site for branding issues and then segment that site into sub-sites targeting each specific brand of product...

/root/
/root/product-1/
/root/product-2/
/root/product-3/ etc.

If you do choose to launch multiple sites, careful planning needs to be done in the linking structure between sites. You don't want to overdo it and there are certain linking structures that lend well in the case of spidering SEs.

The question now becomes maintenance and branding. Do you want to maintain five individual sites or, just one with five different sub-directories. If time is on your side, I might experiment a little. Build the one mother site and see how it goes over the next 6 months. If you find that the site is not performing as you expected, then give the multiple sites strategy a try.

Receptional offered some great advice in regards to PPC. If you are finding that the terms you are targeting are too expensive, then look at other terms that are not as expensive but will bring in the qualified visitors. Even if the terms are expensive, is there an ROI at the current rates?

If you are dealing in products that everyone is selling, then the multiple site strategy may yeild more results. Although I've had great success with using one site and then segmenting into individual sub-directories, each one specific to a product and/or service.