SEO & Physical Product Expert Wanted: Brand vs Domains vs Feeder sites

[Emergent]

My offline retail business ceramicbusiness[dot]com sells a range of high-quality ceramic products (60+ in total)*. These products span multiple (6+) categories such as ceramic kitchenware, ceramic tiles. In addition, the material ceramic itself has multiple (4-5) names people use to search for it, such as ceramics, and polyceramic.

We want to start a strong eCommerce campaign. Based on Keyword research competition is medium to low, and because they were unregistered we have acquired 15+ domain names which cover all of the permutations I have outlined above, ceramics[dot]com, polyceramics[dot]com, ceramickithcenware[dot]com, etc. All these domains combined represent about 15,000+/month exact keyword match google searches.

What would you recommend if our sole focus was long-term building of our online sales? We don't manufacture any items, our selling point is nobody else has built such a diverse range of high-quality ceramic products.

Do I focus on our core domain for the highest volume keyword, and build subpages for each speciality listed above? Or utilise all of our domains? If so, as feeder sites, or individual eCommerce sites selling the specific products? Or something completely different?

Thanks

[shabbirbhimani]

Trying to rank one page (aka Homepage) for all the keywords would not be best option but to split the keywords into categories and rank them would work better.

[Emergent]

Summary: What is the best tactic? (or something else?):

Single domain:
www[dot]ceramicbusiness[dot]com
www[dot]ceramicbusiness[dot]com/ceramics
www[dot]ceramicbusiness[dot]com/polyceramics
www[dot]ceramicbusiness[dot]com/ceramic-kitchenware
www[dot]ceramicbusiness[dot]com/ceramic-tiles

Focus on highest volume keyword on homepage, subpage for each other keyword & category (but then how to handle the five different variations of our keyword ceramic?)

OR

Multiple domains:
www[dot]ceramicbusiness[dot]com
www[dot]ceramics[dot]com
www[dot]polyceramics[dot]com
www[dot]ceramickitchenware[dot]com
www[dot]ceramictiles[dot]com

Different domain for each keyword & category. Again though similar to above, how do I deal with the fact that ceramics, polyceramics, etc are all just different words people use to search for the same thing.

[raviv]

Hi thinkb,
You have got a seed keyword in ceramic products and the rest are all sub-categories in this niche. This is for the purpose of building an ecommerce site.

I am not sure what you are using as your platform for your ecommerce site. You will have to add the products using the ecommerce admin area. I am not sure if you are just using WP ecommerce plugin and want to put a Paypal button or integrate the site with 2checkout or something like that.

Assuming you are going to use a decent ecommerce software like say Magento, all the product pages can be added and optimized suitably for specific products. The meta tags can be appropriately customized in the backend.

When you have a Buy Now button, on clicking, a user will go to the shopping cart (if the site is integrated properly with the shopping cart). Then the checkout process happens and the customer buys the product.

On the front end, you can have a drop down menu under Ceramic Products and each of the sub-categories you have mentioned will appear on this menu.

Using different domain and installing the specific product on each domain (multiple ecommerce sites) will be a headache to maintain in the long run.

You can have good useful content on each of the domains you have registered and have links on them pointing to the appropriate product on the main site.

Also, you can have a Resources tab on the main site where you can have articles (read useful content).

This way you have only one ecommerce site to handle and only one implementation of the shopping cart. Maintaining content on the other feeder sites is important and you will have to do that work.

Best
Raviv

[Emergent]

Thanks raviv.

After more research I have decided to do exactly what you suggested. I will focus on the main site for eCommerce and try hit all keywords, and also create a network of feeder sites using our other domains, providing good free information about each category, and a link leading back to my main site to buy. I do plan on using Magento.

If anyone reads this and thinks you can add value to my idea, or improve upon it, please feel free to PM me, as I will be happy to pay you a consulting fee.

[daddykool]

Other than looking good, why are you using magento for your eCom?

The fastest and most natural way to do what you need to do, is multiple root exact match domain names, indexed with an rss feed first, build these up over a period of time so they are getting natural, social and outsourced traffic (you are building the core site while this happens) then slice the traffic into sub domains on the *same* root domains, then after another period of time, bang all your hard work to the *money site* and take lots of orders...

Hope that sort of helps and makes sense! If it is a JV or you need some assistance fire a PM over :-)