Branching Out with SEO and a Second Website

So your website is functioning, optimized to the teeth, and you are still having a hard time competing. The logical temptation is to build another website as a traffic funnel. It is often recommended by SEO gurus – but how they recommend it varies widely! Just for the record, to get it out of the way early, a blog is just a variation on the second website theme.

The concept is sound – but often the execution of it is not. If you are going to build a second website, there are some things you need to realize:

• You just doubled your maintenance and upkeep. This can be worth it if it is still the most effective use of advertising dollars.
• You just doubled your marketing requirements. You now have TWO sites to promote. Again, done right, it can be a reasonable effort, done wrong, it will drain you without significant return.
• You should not build a second product site, unless you have a separate category of products which does not go with the first.
• If you build an informational site, then it should target a topic which is easy to get traffic for, while approaching the promotion of your product site in a careful and polite manner. This is the kind of site people most often do wrong, by being sloppy about it, providing no new information, or by advertising blatantly.

Creating a second website is done by many companies, and can be a successful way to have the opportunity to optimize more successfully for long tail keywords. This can allow you to compete in crowded niches more successfully, especially when you are the little guy and the others can all outgun you.

But it only works well if it is done intelligently. Just any old site won’t do – it has to be a POPULAR site. This is absolutely achievable, but not in the way that will generally come to mind first for the average business owner. Because often the best topics are not the most obvious.

Using this strategy, a small business can top a big one in the search engines. But only if the concept is executed well.