How Different Are Your Services?

Many companies offer services that differ from each other, but are otherwise related in some way. For example, nail salons sometimes offer tanning services, psychologists offer life coaching services, and so on.

Sometimes these services have a clear relation and connection, and sometimes they do not. With that in mind, there are times when it makes sense to evaluate your services and see if it’s worth creating different websites for different services.

Marketing Distinct Services

I’ve gone through 5 drafts of this post trying to figure out the best way to explain this, and each time I’ve stumbled upon my own words. But I’ll try to use the following real life example:

One day I was researching pest control companies, looking for websites that may need our services. I came across a fairly well marketed website with a lot of content about pest control.

This company, however, also offered gutter cleaning services โ€“ a very, very different service. They advertised their gutter cleaning services on their website as its own special service, as if it related to pest control.

Separate Marketing

The problem is that gutter cleaning has nothing to do with pest control at all. They’re related in that their home services, but they’re different enough that their gutter cleaning service would probably have benefitted from its own website. This would allow them to:

  • Target Customers โ€“ Right now, their website is targeted specifically to pest control. Even if someone does find them for gutter cleaning, chances are they’re not going to turn into a client because their website isnโ€™t written in a way that will attract them.
  • Target Search Engines โ€“ While it can happen on occasion, search engines usually do not reward you for a page that’s unrelated to another page. For example, if I wrote a webpage on offering legal services right now on Great Leap Studios, there is a very good chance it would not rank well in search engines despite our other pages performing admirably.
  • Market Separately โ€“ Similarly, ideally you’ll want to market these services separately, since they’re so unrelated. You can’t really do that if everything is on the same website. You’ll have to add caveats about what the site is about, and make content less relevant towards one of your services each time you add new pages.

Keep in mind that you can also add separate websites to things like Google Places and Yelp if you offer the services separately, whereas if you have only one website you have to choose which service you want to provide most.

Creating New Websites

It often sounds like too considerable an expense to create more than one website, but if you’re offering those distinct services, chances are you’re running them like separate businesses anyway. Something like gutter cleaning is going to be easier to compete with as well since it’s often not as well marketed a service, and the reality is that if you want both services to be successful you’d still have to market a lot more anyway.

Some companies that offer different services, like spa services and massage, are so closely linked that creating a new website would be silly. But if your services are different enough that they can appear unrelated, and represent completely different needs for those that visit your site, you may want to consider starting a new website for those services and marketing them separately.

Author

  • Micah Abraham

    Micah Abraham is the owner and lead content writer at Great Leap Studios (https://GreatLeapStudios.com) and High Volt Digital (https://HighVoltDigital.com).
    Micah has over 15 years of content writing and digital marketing experience, and has owned and operated Great Leap Studios since 2013 and High Volt since 2022.
    He has a degree in Psychology from the University of Washington, and has researched and written content on a wide range of topics in the medical and health fields, home services, tech, and beyond.
    Micah lives with his family in California.

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