Adding Hard-Goods Sales to Content Site

Use same domain or use a new one?

[myrrh]

I have a relatively new content site about widgets that is steadily gaining popularity. I am going to start selling my own line of fine-art widgets. The idea is to use the popularity of the content site to drive visitors to the sales pages.

The question is, do I add the sales pages to the existing content site or put the sales pages on their own separate domain? I'm asking because I'm wondering if they would rank higher in the SERPs if they were part of the existing (content site) domain?

An advantage I see to putting the sales pages on their own domain is more appropriate branding but I don't know if this would outweigh the possible advantage of being associated with a content-rich site.

[undercoverseo]

My $0.02 cents...

If your existing content site is already indexed by search engines and is ranking well for terminology related to your goods for sale it's probably easier for you to promote sales through your existing domain.

Trying to ramp up good search engine results on a new domain might take a while.

[dickbaker]

I did the same thing a few months ago. I took an established site that was getting a lot of traffic and added an online store.

The good news is that visitors to the site check out the online store, and also that it's been easier for me to "quickly" get good rankings for the product pages than it would have been if I'd started a new site from scratch.

The downside is that I think many visitors are confused and don't know if it's a content site or an ecommerce site. That's just a guess, as I don't have any hard facts to back that up. But my conversion rate is terrible.

I asked the same question you just did, myrrh, in another thread but didn't get any good replies.