Should the unrelated service have its own site?

[Guest]

I have a quick question: Will it negatively impact Google SEO if you're just getting your website going with SEO optimization and the bulk of your services (99%) rely on certain related keywords...then you decide to offer a completely unrelated service on your site that will use entirely different keywords for SEO.

Is that a bad idea?

Should the unrelated service have its own site?

Or can it be done successfully on the same site?

Thank you for any insight!

[Andrew]

Short answer is yes. The more focused and relevant you can cover a topic / niche the better.

Can anybody actually quanitify how much of an effect it will have? No.

It’s just best practice to focus your pages on a niche to help build authority with google as an expert in that field. One random page on your site isn’t going to destroy that.

[Violeta]

It's not going to have a negative impact on the SEO, just use different URls to target the other service, targeting 1-2 KW per URL. In short, don't mix your services on the same page, otherwise you'll confuse Google and the users.

[Matty]

It's not going to have a negative impact.

What will be hard though is to rank that new, unrelated service.

Google ranks pages, not domains (they use domain signals, but other pages aren't going to be affected by creating other pages -- for the most part).

Your main service pages will be unaffected. If you really wanted to rank this new service, I usually recommend a separate domain dedicated to services related to that.

Otherwise your only challenge is ranking the new pages.

[Greg]

Good question. Adding an unrelated service with different keywords to your website may affect SEO in two ways. First, it could reduce relevance for the original set of services and keywords, hurting rankings. Second, it might confuse search engines and users trying to understand the focus of your site. If the new service is significant enough and needs its own marketing strategy, create a separate website for it. If related to existing services though, you can optimize for both sets of keywords successfully. Consider creating a section or page on your website dedicated to the new service with optimized content while still under same domain; this way you keep relevance for existing services while targeting new keywords too. It depends on specifics of situation and how different the new service is from current ones - hope this helps! Any other questions?

[Shaun]

We have just split a website in 2. The product range wasn't directly related and felt it made sense to do the split now. SEO was a factor but more to avoid confusion for customers.

[Declan]

I don't understand why you wouldn't just use a different site for the completely different service. You will just confuse and lose customers even if you don't lose traffic.