Greetings all! I find myself seeking advice as the title explains. I am the new and only IT guy at my families small company and they are now relying on me for things that really aren't my strong suit, in this case SEO.

We pay a company a lot of money to develop and maintain our website and that same company does our SEO. The person doing our SEO/Developing has recommended that we have 2 domain names, 1 for each area our business offers service (the areas are next to each other). Thus we now pay double because we have 2 websites. We were told the reason for having 2 was to "capture the whole market". The 2nd website is basically copy and pasted (not a redirected dns).

Our SEO/Developer is also now saying that our websites conflict with each other on websites such as yelp/angies list etc. He should of known this would happen but I understand SEO is forever changing its thinking.

So are we being ripped off? Is it advisable to have that 2nd domain just to dedicate to the service area (county) next door?

I really do appreciate any answers/advice given and thank anyone who answers for their time. I have always loved this community and found it helpful!

If you're paying double for a copy-and-paste job, you're being ripped of, SEO or no SEO. Also I hope it's not truly copy and paste but simply two views of the same thing. Otherwise if you want to change anything and have to make the change twice because you copy-and-pasted it... it's a lot of pain.

As for SEO, two domains may help you or harm you, it depends on the situation and sometimes you just have to try and see what works. From a page rank / backlink point of view it's better to have just one domain so all links count; with two domains you get half on each, and Google may see two domains as "duplicate content". But it depends on the kind of business, people who google your company may be more attracted by a gardening-smallville.foo (if they live in smallville) than gardening-experts.foo (location neutral name). Then again a small local company (that does not ship things world-wide) may fare best with local advertizing.

For a generic background on SEO, there's a "SEO Starter Guide" written by Google, it covers the basics without all the SEO voodoo you find elsewhere.

Personally, I think that the entire(!) business of "SEO" is essentially a scam.

The entire presumption is that, whenever people want to buy anything, they'll "Google it" (picking only this search-engine ...), and that they'll pick (and buy!) from whatever shows up on page #1 or page #2 ... (of what is actually only a couple-dozen pages, despite Google's citation of "millions of entries").

But, what do you actually find yourself doing? Uh huh. "Hey, Joe, I need a new air conditioner in my house. I know you had one put in recently. Who do you recommend?"

Same deal when you want to hire someone: you call their references. "People who will speak well of them." Because you simply don't have time to troll through a huge stack of "SEO'd" resumes.

When you need to make a decision, you need to make the best, least-risky decision as quickly as you can. So that you can then move-along from that decision. You want to "talk to someone." And that's what you do.

Your web-site is, for the most part, a well-written and instantly accessible brochure. It might also be part of the means by which you subsequently transact business, or not. It can be your product catalog. Even thousands of pages that would be prohibitively expensive to print and warehouse can be made available at no incremental cost. These are the things that web-sites are good for. But the potential customers who find you, and who find your site, probably acted on a personal recommendation from a previous satisfied customer. Just like they did fifty years ago.

If you develop a reputation for consistently exceeding your customer's expectations ... a thing known as goodwill ... "word gets around."

Everybody out there is trying to "game Google's system achieve SEO," so this simply creates a level of "top-noise" in the search results which greatly reduces the usefulness of any search result. "Awareness of the existence of the experimenter, on the part of the mouse, permanently changes (and invalidates ...) the experiment." People who once used Google et al to find things have learned this, and have changed their behavior. As, most likely, have you.

frostshultz is totally spot on. And the fact that having two sites is now causing a problem on websites that matter more then clicks and SEO and your SEO person did not foresee this is a humongous, ginormous red flag regarding his marketing abilities.

I agree with sundialsvcs's assessment of SEO in general. SEO just means the the page owner of the top spot paid the most, one way or another, to get there. I disagree that people still rely exclusively on word-of-mouth. Personally, I've never lived in an area long enough to need the same big money service twice, nor have I ever had the luxury of working in the community where I live. Not to sound like a pathetic loner, but I don't know anyone whose opinion I would trust so I do use sites like Yelp and Angie's List to help me identify potential service providers. A decent SEO at least puts a potential service provider within view.

If you were my customer, I'd make sure you had one site that had appropriate key words for all your geographic markets and included the top key words in the title and within the home page and then I'd be done. Not fancy. The only reason I'd have a second site for a different market is if the second market was somewhere far away, like you had one location in Raleigh/Durham and the other location was in Kansas. In that case, I wouldn't use a DNS redirect but actually have a different site. The needs in NC are different than those in KS regardless of the service. Also I would register every domain name that I could that fit mostly to keep other people from getting them. You know: ValsService.com, ValsService.biz, Vals-Service.com, ValService.com, etc. I might not even redirect them. I just might keep them out of the market place.

Hey guys I really appreciate you taking the time to respond! I am afraid the website really is copied/pasted they are both the same except with extremely small differences such as "Free Estimate" and "Free Estimate of Service". That and a different count on the facebook/twitter/google+ icons at the bottom. As for the domains if they made sense I might understand but the 2nd domain is the same as the first it just has "nc" thrown in the middle of it. Both websites have our locations in the text body so I really am starting to see some red flags. The fact that this SEO guy did not anticipate this conflict is what has my boss so pissed off, we pay these people well over a thousand dollars a month.

What would the recommended course of action be? Have 1 domain forward to the more popular one and stop paying for essentially a duplicate website?

I don't feel comfortable telling you what to do, but even when I worked for an Inc. 500 company we did not pay our SEO consultant and marketing web site host that much. And our SEO consultant was awesome.

If I worked for my family's small company, (Well, actually I'd be in prison for having killed somebody if I worked for my family's company.) I think I'd find a nice turn-key host and web building platform (like Weebly or SquareSpace) and do it myself. You could do it more cheaply and more fancily with WordPress and a host, but I don't have time for that. Most of the turn-key providers will have most of the features you want. You might find a provider with all of the features you want. For example if you want to offer scheduling and appointments through your site you might have to look hard to find a provider who includes that. Or you might not and have to integrate a plug-in from a third party. Just like everything else, have a back up handy of your current site. Even screen scrapes are better than nothing.

I guess it really depends on what you want your site to do. If there is a huge interactive component or custom application built in or you have content management integration then a turn-key approach might not work for you.

Capture what market? AnimalsheltersinRiverside.com vs. AnimalsheltersinSanBernadino.com
could be utilized. But if they are both your sites and is copy/pasted, does it matter if it "matches" your other domain?

Or does it match some domain that is NOT yours?

Preach it.

There's a lot of SEO voodoo. If people tell you about rank #1 and how they have to change everything regularly whenever Google changes its algorithm... it's probably homeopathy.

But there's also proper SEO although I'm not sure it should be called that. Lots of these also optimize the user experience. Have good content (not obfuscated in images/flash), properly structured, proper title tags, descriptions and URLs (those define how the Google result looks like, if it does show up - but it also affects bookmarks etc.), and if it's not outright mobile-friendly, at least try to make it not completely horrible for mobile... basically that's what Google's SEO Starter Guide is about. Good SEO is also good user experience, it's very closely related.

These things are "common sense" for any good website but "common sense" amazingly means "hard to get right" for some people.

It matters if it divides their Angie's List reviews between what Angie's List sees as two different companies.

To me, that is "user experience," and it's profoundly important to me as a potential customer. "Most of all, I want your web site to get the hell out of the way." I want it to load quickly, on any ol' browser that I might use, and I want it to be very specific to what I want to accomplish. If I'm using a mobile phone, I want the website to automatically be aware of that. But I am there for a business purpose, and I want the site's entire design to facilitate that purpose.

Fortunately, there are plenty of web-site providers who simply take care of these mundane technical issues for you, leaving you with basically a user-experience design problem: "getting inside the user's head and providing him with a site that Just Works."

There's no "SEO Voodoo" ... least of all, some magick that actually warrants "a thousand dollars a month." It's simply a matter of designing "a great user-experience, for your users," and then deploying it. Don't try to "game Google's system." Don't bother. There's no return-on-investment here.

As I tell my clients: "You know your customers. Trust your gut. If none of this Tom Swift stuff existed, how would you connect with them, what would they want to do, and what would want to you say to them? That's business, and you already know (your) 'business.'"