What’s Better for SEO, Subdomains or New Domains?

So you want to create a new part of your business, but you’re not sure how to incorporate it into your website? We hear you. This is a dilemma as old as time (well, as old as websites, at least). The good news is that you’ve got options. The not-so-good news is that those options come with a bunch of provisos … and depending on who you talk to, you’ll get different advice on what you should do.

Don’t panic; we’re going to lay it all out so you can understand what choices you’ve got, how each of them works, and what their impact is likely to be on your SEO performance. Read on to get a better idea of what’s best for you and your website.

You’ve essentially got two main options:

1. Implement a subdomain on your current website and put it there
2. Get a new domain name and create another website dedicated to whatever your new thing is.

Which Domain Should It Be?

Need to know the difference? Well …

The Difference Between a Subdomain and a New Domain

Your domain is basically your website address. It’s typically whatever your homepage URL is, just without the bit at the beginning nobody bothers saying (https://www.). So yourbusiness.com would be your main domain. Then for every subpage of your website, it builds off that with suffixes to the URL, like yourbusiness.com/shop (these are called subdirectories, but we’ll talk more about them later). Buying a new domain means you buy a new URL and create a website with an entirely new address, like anotherbusiness.com.

A subdomain, on the other hand, is a domain that’s part of another domain. If we revisit the above example, shop.yourbusiness.com is how a subdomain for the shop section of your website would look. Aside from the way it looks, the other major difference with a subdomain is that you don’t have to buy it. Instead, you construct it on your current website. But money isn’t everything, despite what Jerry Maguire might have us believe.

There are a bunch of things to consider when deciding between a new domain and a subdomain: 

• How it will affect your main site.
• What SEO benefit it will have.
• How you’ll keep track of it in Google Analytics.
• Contextual relevance.

There are benefits and drawbacks to either option, though. So sit back and relax; here they come.

The Pros and Cons of Using a Subdomain

First up, subdomains are great for organising and partitioning parts of your website. You’re no doubt familiar with websites having an FAQ or About subpage, which is great for collating a handful of information relevant to your company or website. But if you had a big collection of resources you want to make available to visitors, like whitepapers and eBooks, a subdomain would allow you a better place to chuck everything without it clogging up your main site architecture.

This is important because search engines love organisation and structure. When websites are a structural mess Google gets in a huff and penalises you for it, dropping your relevance score. It’s a common issue for many websites. As they expand over time, things get cluttered, with new pages added here, there, and everywhere. By moving related pages, material, and content under a relevant subdomain title, you can maintain the domain authority of your main site — maybe even improve it – if it makes things more logical and easy to find.

Subdomains are also useful for other specific types of projects. Here are some examples:

• Running recurring campaigns that require different landing pages.
• Creating a dedicated online space to collaborate with another company with split branding (e.g., theircompany.yourcompany.com).
• Regional segmentation, whether locally or internationally (i.e., creating a subdomain for another country so you can branch out into that market with localised search techniques, like themoon.yourcompany.com if you fancy your chances with interstellar expansion).
• If ecommerce isn’t your primary service, but you want to open an online store for merch (e.g., store.yourcompany.com).
• Multiple language versions of your website (e.g., dansk.yourcompany.com).
• Support or events segmentation, where customers require particular information or services that aren’t relevant to the rest of your website (e.g., christmasbbq.yourcompany.com).

Speaking of domain authority, here’s where things get tricky with subdomains.

It’s still largely disputed whether search engines identify a subdomain as part of the main website, but much of this comes down to how the primary domain and subdomain are crawled.  A subdomain is crawled by Google, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be identified as a part of the main domain. Google says it’s fine, advising you to “choose whatever is easiest for you to organise and manage. From an indexing and ranking perspective, Google doesn’t have a preference.”

While this is true, it’s still considered as a separate website, which is why subdomains have to be verified separately from the content that exists under the main domain in Google Search Console. If the content you want to place under a subdomain is relevant and impactful to your main site’s SEO performance, it may be worth building subdirectories instead of a subdomain. This will keep the content on your main site, just moved around a bit so it’s more logical.

A subdomain should be treated similarly to a new domain when it comes to SEO. It will need its own SEO strategy which focuses on specific keywords and terminology to increase its relevance. You’ll also need to integrate this into your SEO strategy for your primary domain; if you don’t consider them in tandem you run the risk of muddying the waters with duplicate content, which will negatively impact the search performance of both main domain and subdomain alike.

That being said, your primary domain’s pre-existing search authority will have some influence over the subdomain, which can be of benefit in the initial stages of establishing its online presence and improve its position on search engine results pages (SERPs). Other mutual benefits come in the form of backlinks from other sites: when they point to your primary domain or subdomain, the other will also reap the rewards for enhanced authority ranking.

Additionally, when it comes to performance analysis, tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console don’t automatically track and report metrics across a root domain and subdomain. This can work well if you intend to treat the content of the subdomain differently to what’s on your primary domain. A subdomain used to compartmentalise particular features or functions, like Google Support or HP Support, will require different analytics parameters than the main site — not to mention a whole new SEO strategy that focuses on the specialist subject matter.

The Pros and Cons of Using a New Domain

Ok, let’s quickly talk about the elephant in the room before we get into the rest of it: You have to pay for a new domain. Yes, it’s true. A new domain means a new website. It’ll have an entirely unique URL, be completely separate from your current domain, and it’ll cost you money.

Why, then, would you want one?

There are various circumstances where companies buy additional domains rather than creating subdomains on their primary website. Let’s run through some of them to see why.

New Business Opportunities

Imagine you run a small restaurant. It’s doing well, you’re happy with how it’s growing. But your ice cream is massively popular and you think to yourself “yeah, I want to sell this during the day when the restaurant is closed and the sun is out.” Logical, sensible, good idea. People love ice cream in the sun. The problem is, your restaurant isn’t suitably set up to be an ice cream parlour. So what do you do?

You’ve got two options: one, get an ice cream van (or one of those bicycles with a little freezer on the front of it), or two, buy the vacant shop next door, knock through the back and set it up as an ice cream shop. Either option would work. The point is that in extending laterally your ice cream shop (or van or bike) is a completely separate entity to your restaurant. You may own them both, but you can run them as different businesses — different customers, different cash flows, different names, different everything — which protects your restaurant if the ice cream shop flops like a soggy wafer cone covered in the melted ice cream of defeat.

This is what a new domain can do if you want to try to expand a particular area of your business without it impacting your core operation and offering. With a new domain, you’ll need to create a whole new website from scratch. It’ll be entirely unrelated to your original site and can stand on its own feet.

While this means building a new site and getting everything set up — which may include complex functionality like booking or ecommerce — it does allow you to create an entirely dedicated SEO strategy designed for the new product or service. Again, this is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s a lot of work. But on the other hand, it’s completely free to be planned and implemented without compromise. This is particularly pertinent when checking your website for aspects of technical SEO. Vital aspects — like the robots.txt file, which instructs Google’s robots on how to treat your site during a crawl — can be fully customised to suit the needs and strategy of that specific site, which may differ from your other, original website.

Jump on the Custom Domain Train

Custom domains are all the rage these days. There are loads of different top-level domains (TLDs) to choose from, which can be used to distinguish specific services or aspects of your business. A great example of this in action is emirates.store. The official store for the airline’s branded merchandise is completely separate from emirates.com, where you book your flights.

This approach may only really be advantageous for the biggest and best-known organisations, but it is an effective way of creating a dedicated space with a novel URL. For smaller businesses, custom TLDs present the opportunity to nab a more relevant URL, should the preferred .com or .org iterations already be taken.

Are There Any Other Options?

You do have another option to consider, if you’re not sure a new domain or subdomain is right for you. We already touched on subdirectories earlier, but let’s just hash out what they are in comparison to the other choices.

Subdirectories — or subfolders, as they’re also known — are the suffix bits of webpage URLs on your site. For instance, the “products” part or yourbusiness.com/products. When you create a subfolder for your site, it produces a new page that sits under the preceding one, so you’re able to have multiple layers of subfolders, like yourbusiness.com/products/novelty-mugs. This is great for compartmentalising your site into distinct areas for easy navigation and creating a logical structure for Google to crawl. 

The problem, however, comes when a new section you want to create doesn’t obviously fit anywhere on your site. Having to wedge it in somewhere or add superfluous content just so it has a justifiable home doesn’t do your SEO performance any good. If Google gets confused or lost while crawling your site, your relevance scores will drop.

Building subdirectories instead of a subdomain is technically the easiest way to go, but always consider its suitability and potential impact before extending your site even further. It could be that having a subdomain, or even multiple domains, will be a better choice in the long run, even if it takes more work and time to get it off the ground.

What’s the Conclusion, Then?

Well, it’s really a question of horses for courses here. Sorry! Every situation is different, so it’s impossible to say one option is definitely the best choice. That isn’t to say there isn’t one, though. You just need to work out based on what you’re looking at.

Generally speaking, a subdomain is a better option for expanding an area of your website that’s related to your primary subject matter but too extensive or complicated to work into subdirectories. This is especially relevant from an SEO perspective because both the main domain and the subdomain will provide some support and context for each other.

A new domain, on the other hand, is better suited to a new business, product or service. Some new business venture or expansion that doesn’t relate closely to the core messaging of your primary domain is likely to perform better in SERPs if it’s managed independently.

Hopefully we’ve given you a good breakdown of your options, so you have a clearer idea of what’s best for you, but if you’re unsure which path to take, why not get in touch with our experts to get some advice on how to approach your domain dilemma?

Or if a new domain is the choice for you, use our domain search tool to see if it’s available.