Number 9 in a series, Business Blog FAQs, culled from my business blog consulting practice.
Think Strategically about Your Blog Domain
Conventional SEO wisdom holds that you are better off setting up your blog within your existing company domain. There are a number of good reasons supporting this point of view. These three strike me as being especially compelling.
- Blogs have many strong SEO characteristics – fresh content, ample opportunities for text and meta keyword optimization, and internal links, to name three of the most important. In addition, blogs attract inbound links – also critical for high search rankings. Adding a blog to your company domain will lift the authority of the entire domain, improving the search performance of all the pages within the company site.
- Blogs positively influence customer perception and branding. Today’s customers, whether b2b or b2c, seek to do business with people, not faceless corporations. Blogs present a golden opportunity to personalize the business and deepen customer relationships. When blogs appear within the company domain, they make a stronger statement than when they are separated.
- Blogs on a separate domain complicate user experience. It’s almost always better to keep visitors browsing or searching within a single website. When you force visitors to shuffle between one site and another, you’re more likely to confuse them … or lose them.
At times, however, the case can be made for setting up blogs on a separate domain.
When the corporate site is sitting pretty for SEO. Suppose the company site has a high authority and is already performing well on search. It might then be advantageous to set up blogs on a different domain and build that one up into a high authority domain as well. This could lead to a situation where a company is competing against itself on important keyword searches – far preferable to competing against competitors.
When branches have different content needs than corporate. Companies with multiple locations often need a diverse web presence. The corporate site might present a general picture of the firm, but individual locations need to speak more directly to their respective markets, addressing local concerns in local language. This situation is well supported by blogs that serve as or supplement local websites. A locally situated blog will strengthen local search performance and transform a token local web presence into one that generates very good sales leads.
When blog content departs from the core business. If you are a tax attorney eager to blog about skydiving, I’m not sure your firm’s website is the place to do it. You may humanize yourself in a way that attracts certain individuals, but you’re likely to scare off many more. This example is not as far fetched as it may sound. A tax attorney may have good reasons for not blogging about his core business. Liability, confidentiality, and compliance issues may make job-related blogging impractical. Perhaps he would be better served by pointing clients and potential clients to his blog selectively and using his blog to cultivate clients who happen to be skydiving enthusiasts.
When starving for quality inbound links. As mentioned earlier, obtaining quality inbound links is an extremely important SEO factor. In some industries, obtaining quality links is very, very difficult. In such a case, it might make sense to set a blog on a new domain to create links to the corporate site. If the corporate site has a low PageRank and limited opportunities to add content, a robust blog might overtake it in authority in a reasonable amount of time. I would view this strategy as a last-ditch effort, though. Too much reliance on inbound links of this type could be interpreted as spam, so proceed with caution and don’t overdo it.
When in need of a defensive maneuver. Some company are extremely vulnerable to hostile user reviews that achieve high rankings on Google and other major search engines. One or two bad reviews on a site like Yelp can go right to the top of the SERP, giving searchers a (often unjustified) negative impression of the company. When this happens, setting up a blog on a separate domain, with the intent of pushing negative search returns down, is a legitimate tactic.
Bottom line – It’s generally better to set up your blog within your existing domain. But don’t go through the motions, think it through. There are exceptions.
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Hi Brad, Your point on content is what drove my decision making a while ago. I ended up separating the blog from my business site primarily because I wasn’t sure where the blogging would take me from a content perspective. I still haven’t decided if that was a mistake, however, it freed me up to not worry about salesmanship (too much) and take the time to explore a bit. Now I’ve begun thinking about how to bring things back together, but the truth is the blog is much more vibrant and interesting than my old consulting site and so it may just become a replacement over time.
Fred, What’s happening to you has happened to many others. Fact is, wherever you have fresh, vibrant content – and your blog certainly has that in spades – you will attract attention. In your situation, I’m wondering: did your blog content end up diverging from your business content? And if so, at this point would you rather make your blog content match your business site, or go the other way around?
I’m having a lot more fun with the blog content, which tells me it should drive the old business site. Really a question of whether I’m going to adapt my business model a bit (very likely). I think the content has been different than it would have been attached to the business site because I was able to veer so far from ‘practical’ advice and get deeper into things I’ve been thinking about for a while. I don’t think there is a strategic reason for that, more a personal hang up on the distinction between what a business site should be and what a personal blog can be. Now all I need is a few additional hours in the day.
Blog is an excellent strategy for online business. However, setting up a blog takes a lot of challenge and one must be able to comply with its demands.
Brad,
I would certainly have thought that setting up a blog using the same domain would have been the shot for corporate blogs in most cases, and I think that your point about the user experience is particularly strong – running the blog on a separate domain does run the risk of making your company come across as being a little uncoordinated from a visitor’s point of view.
But as you say, there are some legitimate advantages of running the blog on a separate domain. I would have thought that setting up a separate domain simply for the purpose of inbound links sounds a bit desperate, but your points relating to other advantages of this approach seem to make sense.
Brad, great discussion that will help business owners carefully evaluate this decision. As noted, there are good reasons to run the blog on a separate domain but the key is to do what is right for your business.
Hi Fred, Perhaps for some people, starting a blog can lead to a reevaluation or a clarifying of the business model – an interesting aspect of social media I haven’t thought about much.
Walter, Companies do indeed need to realize how much time and effort goes into blogging. It’s far from a free marketing gimmick.
Andrew, Sometimes setting up a blog for creating backlinks is desperate, but not always. I’ve seen situations where a company sets up several blogs to discuss completely different topics, which makes sense in and of itself, and has the further advantage of creating numerous interblog links.
Karen, You put it very well – every business is different and one shouldn’t undertake a blog project before thinking it through carefully.
Blog is an excellent strategy for online business. However, setting up a blog takes a lot of challenge and one must be able to comply with its demands.