One company - one site?

Often I come across a situation where firms have two or more sites. For different reasons. Some, besides the new, have a “rudimentary” Internet resource, to which no one remembers login passwords, others made a strategic decision to create several web resources in different areas of activity, and the third have their own websites for each representative office.

Despite the fact that all conversations about working on the Internet with customers begin with the words “I have a very specific business,” my experience shows that in most cases the problems in any segment are the same. Especially when one company has several web resources.

Discuss the opinion? In 99% of cases, having several websites for one company is definitely harmful. We will not consider situations when websites are needed to bring new products to the market or when business lines do not intersect in the audience (production of concrete and furniture).

Consider a situation where you have several sites in terms of time and money in the following areas: development, support, advertising, customer confidence, analytics.

Site development (revision)

As a rule, each site of the company is engaged in a third-party developer company. Sometimes there are "protracted" when the customer can not get the finished site for more than a year.

What time is spent in any project:

• Explain to the new developer the specifics of the enterprise;
• To convey what is actually required of the new site;
• Develop and harmonize contracts, technical specifications, design;
• Provide control over the development process.

If you have one site, and one developer, all of the above will take much less time. And to explain everything several times is not necessary. In addition, the permanent developer will eventually learn to “guess” your desires and understand everything without thorough specifications of the technical tasks.

As for the money, everything is obvious. Multiple sites - the total amount increases several times. Moreover, you and for the placement of sites will pay many times more than one resource. And then also pay for licenses for the “engines”.

Add to this a bunch of documentation with different designs and remember the eyes of your lawyers and accountants when you are trying to explain to them exactly which site you brought the bill today.

Site support

Working with several developers leads to the fact that you have completely different tools for working with site content. For different levels of training editors and webmasters. This is extremely inconvenient and again leads to a loss of time. Not only on the study of "admin", but also on switching from one type of activity to another. If you still remember that the same information (news, special offers, information about the company, etc.) "stretches" from one site to another, then it takes even more time, including checking for "where-that-forgot-change" .

About money. You pay:

• The time of the employee who deals with the sites (and it takes a lot of oh-oh);
• The cost of preparing graphic materials for your sites (yes, you are aware that they also have different designs?).

Advertising

Here is the most interesting. If you have several sites, and the most loyal customers are looking for a company by its name, what resource will they get to? How much will you have to suffer and type in search engines in a different way for combining the name and products of an enterprise before the visitor finds the right one?

Being confused between different designs, absolutely unlike navigation, your buyer will finally find what he needs, but ... it turns out that some of the necessary information is on another site. And again the poor guy understands the wilds of design ideas, crawling between sites and quietly indignant.

Recall the ways buyers come to your sites. Most companies use contextual advertising and engaged in search engine promotion.

As regards the first one, everything is clear: you will need several times less time to create advertising campaigns for one resource and don’t have to pay to bring visitors to different websites with the same key phrases.

From the point of view of search engine promotion, it is easier to promote large sites, both from the point of view of content creation (which also takes a lot of time), and from the point of view of getting links (many links to one site are better than as many to many).

There is one more thing: search engines recognize sites belonging to one company well. As a result, even by the name of the company, only one site can be shown in the issue. And not the fact that it is the one that you assumed.

Customer confidence

To summarize what has been described above, in relation to your visitors.

There are several sites with different designs, navigation and presentation of materials to which your visitors come in different ways. Most likely, the only thing that unites all your resources is the logo. That's just all this does not leave the feeling that we are talking about one company. There is no unity of perception.

This situation not only complicates the search for the necessary information, but also poisons life for you and your customers.

An example from own experience.

The company has 3 sites in different directions:

• Production site (catalogs, photos of goods without prices);
• Site 2B2 segment (catalogs for areas with prices);
• Online store.

All sites have different design, control systems, developers. Suppose our company is looking for a wholesale buyer. Having a little fiddling with search engines, he goes to the production site, but apart from the beautiful pictures and a little information about the company, he finds nothing. In this area, work with wholesalers is conducted individually and, as a rule, prices and conditions are not publicly published. However, the wholesale buyer in any case will be interested in retail prices, which are in the online store! That's just to find this online store, you have to sweat.

In addition, there is practically no information for wholesale buyers on the production site. And all the photos of goods, descriptions, etc. are already present in the online store.

The B2B line includes several dozen products, but the company's product range offers buyers about 1,500 different types of products, and creating another section in the online store is easy.

It turns out that for solving their problems the factory could manage with one resource and save time and money.

Analytics

The audience will flow between your sites and this makes it difficult to analyze visitor statistics. For example, a visitor searched for one of your sites, got to another (Site # 1) and quickly followed the necessary link to Site # 2. Data about people who immediately leave the Site number 1, as well as data on the commission of actions on it, are already distorted. In addition, distorted data and the volume of the audience. When moving from one site to another, the visitor will be considered as new.

As a result, you will not be able to judge for sure how effectively your advertising campaigns work and what needs to be changed in the strategy.

Are there any downsides if the site is one?

Undoubtedly, but they are much smaller and similar situations occur extremely rarely. For example, the risk of hacking the site or the imposition of sanctions by the search engines.

With a clear strategy for promotion and professionals in the team this can be avoided.