Two blogs on a single domain?

[kellys.marketing]

Hi  guys,

Does anyone have any experience of having (trying to rank) two separate blogs existing on one domain, for instance:

www.companysite.com/service1/blogwww.companysite.com/service2/blogThese 2 pages (service 1 and service 2) offer completely different services (rank for different keywords).(for example, a company that provides 2 separate services: SEO service and IT service)Do you think it is a good/bad/confusing search engine practice trying to have separate blogs for each service or do you think there should be only one blog that contains content for both services?Bearing in mind that there is an already existing subdomain for a non-profit part of business that ranks for different keywords: non-profit.companysite.comand it will potentially have another blog so the URL would look like: non-profit.companysite.com/blogAny ideas would be appreciated!Thanks

[KaneJamison]

The URL structure is mostly subjective to me - there's not a clear value between the two. I tend to think of services as a subset of each store location, as opposed to the the locations being a subset of the service sets.

So - if it's easier to build the URLs the way you laid them out already, that's not an inherent problem.

[kellys.marketing]

Hi Kane and Josh,

Thank you both for your opinion.

Is there any reason why these permalinks

• www.business.com/brighton/service1/
• www.business.com/brighton/service2/

are better than

www.business.com/service1/location/brighton
www.business.com/service2/location/brighton

?

I'm hoping that having unique content on each page will help to rank it  and will be 'easy' for search engines to understand that we offer 2 different services (for different audiences) in the same locations.

Thanks a lot again!

[KaneJamison]

Hey there,

There's no problem with running 2 different blogs with www.companysite.com/service1/blog & www.companysite.com/service2/blog URL structures. Hubspot and Moz are both good examples of companies that segment out 2 or more blogs in different subfolders. If both blogs have the same categories, you may bump into conflicting issues, but you should be able to segment these, eg title tags of "Service1 Category Name - Company Name" and "Service2 Category Name - Company Name".

Not sure about that non-profit subdomain you mentioned - that sounds like quite a few blogs. But, if the content is truly different then it's not a big problem.

As Josh said, the local service landing page scenario you laid out is a totally different situation. If your two services share an office in that city, then I would generally prefer to see this permalink variation, but it's not a deal killer:

• www.business.com/brighton/service1/
• www.business.com/brighton/service2/

For a moment, let's say you do carpet cleaning and window cleaning. Having two pages for those cities like this is entirely fine, if you properly build out unique content for those pages that is different than the other city and service pages across the site. Otherwise, these pages are effectively duplicate content, and they aren't going to perform well. Examples of unique content for a location+service page would be testimonials from customers at that location, names/bios of staff at that office, custom photography for that office and their work and services, etc.

[kellys.marketing]

Thanks a lot Josh!

According to your answer, do you think the same principle applies for a website that offer different services in the same locations. For example,

www.business.com/service1/location/brighton &
www.business.com/service2/location/brighton

Do you think it would be easy for search engines to understand that there is one (same) business providing different services in the same locations? Or would this url structure be too risky?

Big thanks!