It’s All About Your Resources

There are a few different ways that you can configure your wedding/event site and we wanted to share our thoughts on some best practices so you can choose the appropriate approach.

First off if you use the FlowerManager Wedding / Event site it is either hosted under your site at domain.com/events or under a separate domain of your choosing. There are pros and cons to consider having it set either way. We will specifically be focusing on SEO relevance and the blog portion in this post but we will also be considering user experience.

There are a few different scenarios we need to cover, the first being what we recommend the most for peak SEO performance as well as branding and user experience.

The Scenarios

Top Recommendation

• Have your commerce site set up with it’s own internally hosted (ecommere-doman.com/blog) commerce oriented blog
• Have your Weddings / Events site set up with it’s own domain with it’s own internally hosted (wedding-doman.com/blog) wedding oriented blog.

This will provide the best user experience because the entire site will be focused on what the customer is interested in viewing. E-commerce has no relation to weddings or events, so keeping the sites separated allows two things.   It allows us to provide the best user experience for each site and it allows us to have content targeted to each segment… wedding/vents and e-commerce. This will make it way easier for Google to classify the sites and provide good search results for the correct terms.

This is the most comprehensive approach but would require you to generate content for both an e-commerce blog and a wedding /event blog. Your wedding site should be completely targeted to the weddings market. Your e-commerce site should be completely targeted to the retail flower market.

Then cross-link between the two sites (from the header of your commerce site with the header “Weddings” or “Events”), product detail pages and from blog posts. This “cross-linking” will help gain relevance for the Wedding site and also help improve your commerce site’s domain authority. It will also serve to help drive your users to each of your web sites and promote your brand.

*If you currently have external blogs we can import that content into your new internally hosted blogs.

The Pros Of This Scenario

• Two individual properties, both aligning with the brand but targeting separate buying personas
• Better user experience as all content is directly targeted at the buyer’s intent
• Cross-linking SEO strategies between two well established domains
• Two independent content engines using the blogs to generate traffic for each domain

The Cons of This Scenario

• Resource intensive, as you will have to generate good content for both domains (which we provide for our 360 marketing clients)
• The Wedding or Events site that is on a separate domain than the commerce site may temporarily not rank as well while Google indexes the content of that site and re-evaluates it’s ranking patterns. The more content that you write on your blog however the faster it will be indexed and the better it will rank. In the long term it’s well worth it.
• The commerce site will possibly drop in rankings in reference to “Wedding” related terms if we peel off the Wedding or Events site into a separate domain. Once the Wedding or Event domain is established though it will rank well on it’s own.

For The Resource Constrained

If you can only manage the content generation for one property then we recommend having the Wedding / Events site on your commerce domain. Which would basically mean if you go to your FlowerManager’s commerce site the “Wedding” link would go to domain.com/events

To generate content from one domain you should have a single internally hosted blog on your commerce site at domain.com/blog and from it post both content targeted at commerce users and wedding-focused users. Just be sure to keep it well organized so your visitors can easily find what they want.

The Pros Of This Scenario

• Less resource intensive
• All links coming in to your Wedding site or your commerce site will be hitting one domain, meaning the authority of that domain will increase fast

The Cons of This Scenario

• Not targeting individual user-intents, bad for user experience overall
• Harder to rank for Wedding terms as content is not as focused as it would otherwise be on separate domains
• Blog becomes convoluted with both commerce and wedding focused content

Other Considerations

If you already have an active external Wedding / Event blog, setup the Wedding or Event site under that domain and we can import the content from that blog that is already present over to the FlowerManager Events blog. We can then 301 redirect the old content to your newly imported content so you won’t lose link authority from old posts. Then you will have all the content you already posted that was gaining relevance for the blog as well as the rest of the content on the site that is beautifully designed and laid out for SEO success.

If you already have your Wedding / Event blog on your FlowerManager commerce site but you can manage content for two individual properties we can move the Wedding / Events site and the Wedding / Events Blog over to the separate domain of your choosing where it can start gaining relevance in the search engines independently from your commerce domain.

Generally we don’t recommend having an external Wedding or Event site unless it has an internally hosted blog that is generating content. It is too hard to rank in semi-competitive markets without a content engine to support it.

We’re Here To Help

This can get a bit confusing so please feel free to contact us at 941.927.7674 with any questions about the 360º marketing program or the information above!