Why Businesses Need Multiple Domains for a Single Website?

Google owns 2549 domains. For a single business name ‘Google’ the search engine has bought and stored 2549 domains. What’s wrong with these people to shop for multiple domains when one for the website is enough?

There are several logical reasons why businesses spend money to buy multiple domains. Any business want to to protect their brand reputation. Also, customer data security is paramount. Thus, for any business, brand reputation and data security are vital parts and therefore large enterprises prefer to use best Multi Domain Wildcard SSL certificate as an ideal choice as all domains and its sub domains can be covered in a single ssl certificate.

That again circles back to the question of why businesses need multiple domains. What follows below are some logical reasons why enterprises need multiple domains.

We spell it wrong

Think about it. Most users, including you and I, make mistakes while typing a website’s name. Still, we get redirected to the intended domain. It is because the website owner was wise enough to buy multiple domains that the user could probably type when they want to visit the website.

So, even if you type ‘www.googel.com’, you will be taken to www.google.com. Google had to buy multiple domains considering the many typo errors and misspelling that users might make while visiting their website. Similarly, a business website which can be easily misspelt might also have to buy multiple domains.

To protect Brand Identity

The problem with the internet is that it is easy for con person to replicate any website or page initially owned by someone else. Like in the previous example, if Google had not bought the domain ‘www.googel.com’, some con person would buy it to run a sham website. It could affect Google’s brand identity adversely as a search engine.

Furthermore, it could also deplete the trust that customers place on Google. The same applies to every other website, including Amazon, eBay, Zappos, and so on. If you have a business name, it is better to buy all related domain names so that nobody can use them to run fraudulent websites. Thus, for business, even with a single site, there is a need to have multiple domains.

Geographical expansion

One business, one website & multiple languages. Doesn’t it sound awesome? Think of the benefits that you can have if you have numerous business website domains like mybusinessname.co.us, mybusinessname.co.uk, mybusinessname.ca, and so on.

You can retain the same business name for multiple regions without any change. This will assist your business in geographical expansion without compromising on your business name.

All you will need is a single TLD (Top-level domain) under which multiple domains can be added for each region or locale.

Helps you own all the traffic

Would you like to lose traffic coming to your website to your competitor? No, right? In that case, you need multiple domains. Like I said at the beginning of this post, it is common perception that users easily remember same TLD with multiple domains/subdomains like example.com, blog.domain.com, mail.xyz.com, payment.domain.com. It is hard for users to remember multiple domains like they may not remember other domains that could end with .org, .us, .au, etc.

It is highly possible that someone who wants to steal your traffic could buy these domains. If they manage to rank those pages as well (in competition with your domain), they would be able to win traffic as well. In the end, you will lose all the traffic that is supposed to come to your branded website. Having multiple domains will help you consolidate and own all the traffic.

One brand, multiple products

Be it in retail or software; businesses often come up with numerous product variants. When there are various variants, having separate websites for each of these variants would help in branding. It also helps deliver contextually relevant and focused marketing messages to website visitors.

Also, these multiple domains also give SEO advantage. You can link the subdomains to the top-level domain. Search engines will crawl, index and rank them in association with the domain authority of the top-level domain.

As a result, your product pages will also rank higher and bring in more organic traffic. If in any day of the future you want to close a product page, you can hide those page(s) from the sitemap. There is no need to bloat your website with unwanted pages.

Who needs multiple domains?

I have advocated the benefits of having multiple domains for a website. But, all said, I must also highlight that not everybody needs multiple domains. Multiple domains are best suited for those who need to secure their online brand identity, prevent traffic from getting diluted or for creating demarcated domains for each business service. Brick and mortar websites, as well as businesses offering one or two products/services, do not need multiple domains.

At Last

The onus is upon you to decide the number of domains you need to run your business efficiently. You can have multiple domains for each product, for each location or even for each service.

The only thing you might want to bear in mind is that, no matter how many domains you have, ensure that all of them are adequately secured with an SSL certificate like mutli domain wildcard or SAN SSL Certificate ( mutliple domain ssl) for user’s data security.