SEO Strategies
Separating Brands and Products
Strategies for relevant traffic by Tim Dorey
Jan 04, 2005
The task
One of our search engine optimization clients began offering new services that were not part of their existing product lines. Our initial recommendations were to add new pages to their existing website and optimize the HTML, as is commonly done to accommodate the information on the new services.
The problem
After a few months of reviewing the search results we discovered that the new pages added were actually hindering website traffic for the existing targeted keywords. Many popular methods of search engine optimization suggest that the more content a website has, the more volume of search engine traffic it will receive. This may be true for overall traffic but the website traffic for a targeted keyword may actually decrease as you add more content.
The new service content made the existing pages less relevant as it caused the keyword density to become diluted. Based on the addition of the new pages, the website was receiving new traffic but old targeted traffic was decreasing.
Solving this problem
Two products, two sites
Our strategy was to separate the new services from the existing products and services with different websites and domains.
Our client's existing website was http://www.vialect.com. They offer a very popular Intranet software package and rank on the first page with Google for the keyword phrase "intranet software." In order to increase market share they wanted to begin offering general IT outsourcing and web based application development.
We concluded that a separate site would be needed and it was created as http://www.vialect.net. This website would only contain content relevant to the new service offerings. The website would still contain typical corporate information and the look and feel was adjusted in order to help define the new services. More importantly, the search engines saw the pages as much more relevant than if they had been included with the existing website.
Connecting the sites
It was important to cross-link the websites in order to provide incoming links between them. Since the vialect.net site was new, linking it to an established website helped to get the pages indexed quicker.
The results
The main website vialect.com continues to provide good sales leads for the company and the new services offered on the .net site are now a distinct brand. Traffic on both websites is increasing every month. The most important result of this project was that each site is now receiving relevant traffic.