3 Benefits of Owning Multiple Domain Names

As every website owner knows, there’s a lot that goes into choosing your first domain name. 

Will your new site be an extension of your existing online sales platform, or will it be your first foray into the world of eCommerce? Do you have the right team to take care of your branding, marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) as soon as you launch your site?

Purchasing a website domain is a smart business decision that both upstart e-retailers as well as large enterprise organizations should make, but it’s also one that requires thoughtful, thought-out answers to these questions and many more.

Why, then, do certain businesses go through the effort to purchase and use multiple domains?

There are, in truth, a few ways for businesses to make the most of online sales with multiple domains. Depending on your level of brand recognition, your online conversion strategy, and your current level of business traffic, multiple domains can direct potential customers to your site and away from your competitors. In fact, having multiple sites that cater to multiple audiences you’re targeting can make it easier to customize your brand messaging and marketing techniques that hook specific customers.

If you’re curious about how multiple domains can give your online sales a competitive advantage and are wondering what your next steps should be, a good place to start is with the benefits that come with owning multiple domains. To that end, let’s dive into the three biggest reasons businesses should buy more than one domain and how sticking with just one can actually hurt your business’s online sales and traffic in the long run.

1 – Greater real estate in search results

Businesses with just a single target audience often operate in a highly niche market. So unless your business offers very specific products and services for its dedicated fans, chances are high that multiple demographics comprise your current target market.

SEO makes it viable for a single business to cater to many different audiences with specific, purposefully branded domain names. Imagine, for instance, an online business that offers multiple product lines. 

Each product caters to a different demographic, and each person in those demographics has wildly different search histories from the people in the other demographics. With SEO, businesses can take advantage of multiple domain names that take up a greater amount of real estate in search results, because different demographics search for products using different terms in their searches.

Specific domain names for your different brands, therefore, require a keyword strategy to rank well among your customers’ search results. It’s important that you devise a keyword strategy with your marketing, advertising, SEO, and web design experts that you can leverage when you create your microsites. Microsites are concentrated clusters of web pages that can function as repositories of highly specific content that’s unique to your brand. You can combine SEO and your microsites to feature content that your different target markets are searching for and rank higher among their search terms. 

Online businesses with multiple brands may want to have additional ways to implement a keyword strategy at their disposal. A strong method to boost overall search result rankings for your different products and services is to focus on 301 redirects. 

301 redirects represent the strength that backlinks have when it comes to boosting overall rankings. 301 redirects permanently redirect your additional domains with microsites to your primary website. The redirects that you gain from your other sites all contribute to how high up in the search results your domain goes and, ultimately, help give your multiple domains more overall real estate among different user searches.

Bear in mind that when you use multiple domains that are each associated with a website, you’ll need to be mindful of publishing duplicate content. Duplicate content is a common pitfall that businesses with multiple domains fall prey to, and it can do serious damage to your unique content’s integrity in the eyes of search engines such as Google. Search engines aren’t very good at knowing what to index and what to exclude when they run into duplicate content, so always keep what you publish unique to each of your domains and avoid taking a hit to your hard-earned search result rankings. 

2 – Protection against user error

Everybody makes mistakes, and oftentimes they make them with spelling. Spelling errors in address bars can keep your primary domain hidden from users, especially if your brand name uses unusual or uncommon words or phrases.

Multiple domain names can help people find your primary domain’s landing page, even if they make typos along the way. Businesses with brand names that can be difficult for the spelling-challenged to type should invest in multiple domain names that can pick up on potential variations on their main domain’s name. 

You’ll want to confirm that any domains with misspellings of your name aren’t already registered to other owners; most of the time, registered domain owners don’t hide their contact details and can be easily identified with a domain lookup tool.

Without some allowance for typos, users may enter an incorrect variation on your primary domain’s name into their address bar and wind up at a competitor’s main landing page instead. Even if you’re not ready to snatch up variations on your primary domain name with a new domain just yet, you can still leverage data in the meantime to see the search queries people use to locate your domain name. This way, you can better inform your choice of a new domain name when you decide to purchase one.

Google, thankfully, provides ways for webmasters, web developers, and even non-tech-savvy business professionals to use data to see misspelled terms that relate to a domain name. The Google Search Console lets users log in via their Google account and filter through the search queries users have previously typed to find your primary domain name. This tool is particularly useful if you’re searching for a recurring typo that may have to do with your site’s name. It’s highly recommended that you purchase a domain name with a frequently misspelled term directly relating to your business so that you can redirect a greater number of users to your primary website.

The obvious downfall of owning multiple domain names to snatch up typos is contributing to a sense of confusion among users. Multiple domains with similar-sounding names can confuse users searching for your brand and, if you aren’t careful, can even make people decide that it’s not worth their time to figure out which of your domains is the one they’re looking for. You need to be mindful of the intent behind each additional domain you purchase and mitigate any potential sense of confusion among users searching for your domain.

3 – Prevention of brand poaching

If you’re great at what you do, someone, somewhere will eventually take notice. Copycats with sound-alike names pose a threat to your brand and cause your potential customers to miss out on what you have to offer. 

Multiple domains can go a long way toward protecting your brand from jealous competitors who want a piece of your business traffic. Come into contact with a domain name that sounds a lot like yours? It’s a good idea to purchase it before copycats secure it and unfairly divert customers away from your landing pages. After you’ve purchased the multiple domains that you’ve kept your eye on, it’s time to consider whether you also need to rebrand your sites. 

Rebranding is a necessary step for businesses that previously used different brand names in their domains. Businesses that are in need of a new hosting plan, these days, are typically in luck when they choose a reputable host that offers affordable plans with sign-on benefits. 

According to online marketer and web developer Gary Stevens of Hosting Canada, at least one domain name should be offered for free when you select a host for your site. 

“Most good hosting companies (like the ones we recommended) will provide you with a free domain when you sign up for a new hosting plan,” says Stevens. “Another term you might run across is the domain name record. This is a reference to the way that the internet works. The domain you just bought is not actually how the internet servers find and display your website. Instead, they take a user’s request and match up the domain to a sequence of numbers in the registry, called an IP address, and send over the associated files – which just happens to be your website.”

Appropriately branded domain names that are readily obtainable through trusted hosting providers can protect your brand for the long haul. For businesses that want a name change and a new domain to boot, rebranding with multiple domains maintains the integrity of your old site while defending your new one against would-be copycats. This balance between previous and new domain names to articulate the intent behind your multiple brand and protect it from imitators creates the opportunity to nurture long-lasting, loyal brand evangelists. 

Brand evangelists form the bulwark against competitors with unscrupulous online marketing tactics. What’s more, Although it’s difficult at first, building brand familiarity and getting people to talk about your product or service not only helps solidify your brand as one-of-a-king, it can also pay huge dividends in the future. 

A customer who has had a great experience with your company is a huge asset to your brand. These people will become brand evangelists, spreading the word about your amazing service or high quality products and continually bring you more business. Of course, building these levels of loyalty takes a lot of time and effort. 

Are multiple domains right for your business?

We mentioned a little while back that, although rare, certain businesses operate in niche markets or are otherwise under industry-related constraints that make multiple domain names unnecessary. Small brick-and-mortar retailers, for example, or micro merchants that fill orders placed through mobile apps, likely don’t need multiple domains with names specifically tailored to multiple brands. Is your business name simple and straight to the point with little room for confusion? It’s probably best to stick with a single domain with an equally specific name. 

Purchasing and setting up multiple domains with different names also requires a certain amount of available resources and personnel. A multi-domain development strategy requires that you establish the appropriate number of redirects to funnel visitors from your microsites to your primary domain. 

Speaking of microsites, your business also needs the talent to create unique content wherever possible on your additional domains that can engage target audiences whose behavior you must measure and analyze. That’s right, you also need the resources to measure and analyze the results of your visitor behavior across all of your domains in order to gauge which sites are doing well and which ones could use improvement.

If you’re still certain that owning multiple domains can grant you the competitive advantage online you’ve been looking for, then you have multiple benefits of owning different domains to look forward to. 

Conclusion

Multiple domains make it possible for high-quality online businesses to build and maintain the brand recognition and sales growth they deserve. Greater real estate among the search results of users in different target demographics suddenly becomes viable with multiple domain names that rank for different search terms. 

With these multiple domains, businesses can protect themselves from copycat competitors interested in owning domains with similar-sounding names. Multiple domains are certainly not for every modern business, but they no doubt give businesses that invest in their different brand identities, SEO strategies, and web hosting providers a leg up on the competition.