One Business, Multiple Divisions.  One Website or Many Websites?

April 1, 2022

We have clients who come to us and ask this question all the time. They have one business, and their business has multiple divisions. They know that they need a website, but they don’t know if they just need one website or if they need many websites. Fortunately Stacy Brockmeier, our Chief Wearer of Many Hats, has a set of questions that she has them answer. Then armed with those answers, she tells them whether they should go with one website or many websites. 

Stacy agreed to share her magic questions so you can understand for yourself if you need one or many websites for your business with multiple divisions. 

Podcast Summary Notes:

Monica:  Okay, Stacy, let’s start at the top. You have a client you’re sitting down with and they have a big business. They have multiple divisions and they’re not sure whether to build one website, or multiple websites. How do you start that conversation?

Stacy:  Oftentimes, I’m going to start that conversation with lots of questions about the business in general, but really where I’m going to dive into is how the audience buys the product or service – as in if it’s the same audience that buys or if there’s a lot of crossover.

So the first question I often ask is, how do you answer the phone? 

Do you call all of your divisions the same thing? Do they have different phone numbers? Do they have different offices? So we’ll start down that path. 

The second question I always ask is whether your businesses or your divisions share the same name. 

If the answer is no, it’s pretty automatic that you’re probably going to have different websites, while you might interlink those websites so that people can get from one to the other easily.

If you have three logos at the top, your visitors are just going to be confused. It doesn’t work out that well. It’s like Athleta, Gap, and Old Navy; three different logos, three different business names. All of them really sell close to overlapping markets, but they’re all branded really separately and marketed differently. So they get three websites, but they also link to all the other ones at the top and bottom of every website. Once you add stuff to your cart, they ask if you want to buy from one of their other companies.

Another thing to think about is, what types of services are you offering? 

I like to use a residential and commercial builder in this aspect. So a lot of people who are soliciting commercial builders to build an office for them or to do work for them in that capacity, are people who live in a house. So they can use that same builder to build their residential home as they use to build their office. You’re providing the same service to two different audiences. But that audience can flip over to the other service really easily. 

And so I think that’s super important to think about is, how does the audience purchase and can they purchase from your other division relatively easily? Most of the time, those types of companies have the same name for both of their divisions. They often don’t even have a tagline underneath it. That’s different for commercial versus residential. They’re usually just under the same umbrella.

They have the same logo, they have the same colors. They have the same service, just selling it in different ways to different people. I think that’s really important to to understand whether your divisions have the same brand

Now one thing that I do find confusing is – and city websites and nonprofit websites do this all the time… 

For example, in our city of Columbia, we have a fitness center, it’s called the ARC. The ARC website is inside of the City of Columbia website and doesn’t make sense to me. I understand that the ARC is provided by the city, but it has its own brand and there’s lots of information that’s actually shared inside there. So it doesn’t really make sense that they’re all conjoined, that they’re all joined at the hip. It’s the same place where I would go to learn about utility information.

I think that they should be two separate websites. It’s not commonly referred to as the City of Columbia ARC. It’s just the ARC. We know that it’s affiliated with the city, but I would venture to say that the vast majority of the general public maybe doesn’t until they go to search for it – and then they’re confused about why that website is on the city website with weird sub pages and hard to find. It’s just a collection of PDFs. It’s a hot mess. 

The second example that I find gets nestled together is that nonprofits might have a second entity. 

So for example, let’s say that your nonprofit has a secondhand store. The nonprofit’s name is one thing, the second hand store is another thing. Those don’t need to be the same website. They should be two separate websites. Domain name should be the name of the secondhand store, people don’t necessarily know that it’s under your nonprofit. 

Now, it’s different if your nonprofits name is Goodwill. But a lot of them have a different name for their secondhand store than they would for their nonprofit. And in that way, they should be two separate websites, even though the donors might donate clothes and donate money and all overlap. 

Another example is in the construction world…

If you have a construction company where you have a quarry, an asphalt plant, a paving company, and a trucking company – it’s all vertically integrated. Most of the time, in the construction world, those entities operate completely separately from one another, even though they’re owned by a parent company. So in that case, we would have a parent company website that links to all of them. But then each one would also have their individual website and their individual domain name, and their individual logo. 

There are individuals who have brochures, all with different brands. 

Because they’re always hiring different people to work at their different locations. You just have to think about it. If somebody is looking for this division, how are they looking for it? If it’s not directly tied to the parent company, it doesn’t make sense to even try to house them together. It’s better to just separate them to start and then link them back and forth. I think that it’s super important to think about it that way.

An important question in regard to whether you need just one website or multiple websites is how your customers interact with your staffing. 

If you have a service and all the services are sold by the exact same person, then I think that it could be all on the same website. You’re probably really doing your salesperson a disservice by having them in two separate websites because people get confused. They think the salesperson left one company to go to another company. They’re not sure where this person works. In those scenarios, a lot of people don’t understand who owns that company. They just know that they work with Company X. And John was the salesperson for company X, and then they Google Search John’s name and now it shows up on company Y.

For example, if you’re an optometrist and you have an optical store within your optometry practice, should they be named different things? If you only have one salesperson selling all your services, then your company is probably small enough that you don’t need two websites.  

Is your website just an online brochure? 

If your website isn’t highly interactive with your clients and prospects, but rather just an online brochure telling people about what you do, it is easier to have more than one of those. It’s gonna make things clearer for people. You’re not replicating a bunch of functionality. You’re telling a story, and you’re telling it underneath the brand of one division and underneath the brand of another division. 

Ultimately, I really think that you just have to think about how your audience interacts with your company and how they know you.

If they know that you are X company residential and X company commercial, and you have different names, then that’s something to consider. If you answer the phone as one name for one company, and another name for the other division, think about those things. That is how your audience knows you. At the end of the day, the goal is for them not to be confused when they’re looking for you.

If you have conversations with your audience and they say, “Oh, I didn’t know that those two things were tied together,” then that might be an indicator to you that you may actually need to have two separate websites. They’re not going to be searching for this other service underneath the parent company name. Instead, they will look for the specific service name. And it will be easier for them to find in Google if it is tied to a domain name, a specific business listing in Google that is all joined. 

I’m not saying you can’t educate them. But when it comes down to your website, you want people to be able to find it.