SEO Tactics For Multi-Domain Websites

One website is all you need to build a thriving business, right? Well, it can be, but there are potentially more lucrative opportunities to explore.

You could also go with a multi-domain approach, in which you’ll buy, set up, and manage multiple domains that complement each other and take up as much SEO real estate as possible. That’s why today, we are talking about multi-domain strategies, what they are how they work, and why you should consider building more than one website for your brand over time.

Let’s put all of that into perspective, talk about digital marketing strategies, and give you the key tips you need to know to make this approach work for your brand.

Why Build Multiple Domains?

There are many benefits to owning multiple domains and building multiple websites, so let’s explore some of them to give you a more in-depth perspective on the matter.

The first benefit and the most important one for our topic today is that owning and managing more than one domain allows you to take up more space in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). You do need to maximize the individual SEO potential of each page on your site, of course, but you will still have to compete with tens and hundreds of other brands for that top spot.

When you own multiple domains, you can work to get all your websites to that first page on Google, effectively taking control of the top results. This won’t eliminate the competition by any means, but it will give your brand(s) more visibility and authority in the space.

Secondly, owning multiple domains allows you to get granular and detailed with search intent.

This means that you can create bespoke content strategies and communication tactics that will appeal to each of your target demographics specifically–making each domain more relevant in Google’s eyes. This will make each of your sites move up in the SERPs simply due to relevance because they bring hyper-personalized content to their audience.

Of course, this also allows you to cross-promote your sites, which we’ll cover in a minute.

Choosing the Right Domains

When it comes to creating a network of websites for your business, it all starts with choosing the right domains.

When you are looking into domain names and how to maximize their potential for your brand as a whole, there are a few rules to keep in mind:

• Consider niche-specific domains instead of generic ones like .com or .net.
• Make sure the domains are easy to remember and write.
• Try to incorporate a top-level keyword.
• Avoid numbers and special characters.
• Use a domain name generator to grab domains quickly before someone else buys them.

If you are operating in one country, then by all means opt for a country-specific domain name to help with localization and local SEO. However, if you are operating internationally, then make sure to opt for general top-level domains and niche domains such as .store or .tech and the like to better personalize different microsites.

It’s always important to choose a reliable domain register, one that invests in cyber security and has clear policies on domain transfers, add-ons, and services.

Once you have all your domains in place, you can start integrating your SEO-backed content strategies.

Creating a Content Strategy for Each Site

Managing a multi-domain strategy means that you are actually creating several different content and SEO strategies for each of your websites. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that you will need to invest more time and resources, it just means that you are splitting your overarching strategy across multiple sites, with a unique opportunity to make each of them more granular and detailed.

This is a golden opportunity to hyper-personalize and to bring your potential customers and your online audience exactly the kind of content, products, and services they’re looking for. It’s also an opportunity to integrate hyper-focused keywords throughout the entire website to make it as relevant as possible for the search engines.

With that in mind, make sure to conduct keyword research for each of your domains, based on what you’re selling and what you’re ranking for in the SERPs.

Once you have your domain-specific keywords, you can create content and topic clusters that are hyper-focused on a specific website and its audience. With your topic clusters, you can start creating content for each of your sites, populating your landing pages and blog pages with value-driven content and relevant keywords.

This brings us to cross-promotion opportunities.

Overlapping Content and Cross-Site Promotion

Occupying as much SEO real estate as possible with multiple domains opens new opportunities for cross-website promotion, and not just that, but cross-promotion on social media and other channels. When it comes to promotion in general, this is a good opportunity to create a digital business card in order to have all your domains in one place that you can easily share with your online as well as offline audiences.

Bringing audiences from one micro-brand to the other is a great way to maximize your following across the board, and you need to combine various dissemination strategies.

You want your website-specific content strategies to actively talk about and promote your other websites, making sure you integrate mentions and links to your other sites whenever possible. That said, you need to integrate them like any keyword or affiliate link–naturally and subtly.

Don’t stuff your keywords and don’t push your other sites on your followers, readers, and customers. Only mention them when it’s natural to do so, and when the other site would actually have something of value to offer to the customer.

Use your topic clusters to cross-promote your other sites in the content itself, and always think of how you can break up the text with interesting visuals. Create clickable banners and CTAs, entice people to explore your other sites with clear value propositions, and use the visual identity of your other sites to complement your content.

Internal Linking: Connecting Your Sites

One of the biggest elements of cross-domain promotion, which will greatly impact your SEO, is internal linking between sites. Internal linking typically means linking your pages in your content on one site, but in this case, we’re talking about internal linking from the perspective of your brand family as a whole.

Essential internal linking best practices include consistently identifying and linking to the most relevant content and pages, an important practice as your websites expand. Upon adding new pages and content, it's important to create links from your existing sites promptly. This approach elevates their visibility, strengthens authority, and facilitates the flow of content across your other domains

Cross-website linking is an important part of your overarching SEO strategy, but you have to remember that quality beats quantity every time. So make sure that what you’re linking to is relevant.

Build up Your Social Media Accounts

Social media and SEO go hand in hand, and one can significantly impact the other. When you’re building and managing multiple domains and micro-brands, you want to make sure that each of them has its own, unique presence in the online world–and that includes social platforms.

You have to focus on building up these social media accounts to drive traffic to your new domains, and to cross-promote, tag, and post about your other websites on your accounts. This will work almost in the same way as your on-site cross-promotion and linking, making sure to talk about your other sites when it’s relevant to do so.

If you commit to posting regularly on all these channels, and you tend to meticulous community management, you will open up great cross-tagging and promotion opportunities. You will also be able to link to your various sites and pages in your social media posts, increasing backlink capacity and traffic–all of which tell Google that these sites are relevant to your audience.

Leveraging UGC for SEO

Lastly, user-generated content is a great way to make your websites more visible in the search engines and to build up their credibility in the online world.

Make sure to focus heavily on gathering positive reviews, showcasing testimonials on your site and socials, and incentivizing your audience to create photo and video content. This can be content where they talk about one of your micro-brands as a whole, or it can be about a specific product or service they purchased.

Keep in mind that influencers fall under UGC as well, and you can work with them to boost the reach of micro-brands and domains by sharing them with their audience. This will create more relevant backlinks, and it will drive traffic and engagement to those sites, making them more relevant in the eyes of the search engines.

Over to You

Managing more than one domain is a great opportunity to create multiple brands that are connected, that promote each other, and that dominate the SEO space in your industry. These sites will all have their followers and target demographic, but they will be complementary to one another in terms of the services they offer, the products they sell, or simply the problems they solve.

This way, you don’t have to think about optimizing a single website for all your customer groups, especially if there’s a lot that you offer, but you can optimize each of the microsites for maximum results. Consider building more websites in 2024 to take your brand forward as a whole, and use these tips to reach new heights of success.

Ciara Byrnes spends most of her time reporting on digital marketing for an over-stressed audience of marketers and business owners trying to keep up with the fast pace of change. To center herself, she has become a wellness enthusiast, reaching “highs” like morning yoga on the porch of her family’s summer lake cabin to “lows” like failing to convince herself that wheatgrass is actually yummy.