Should I worry about retail and wholesale sites competing in SEO?

[Jannaugoneandco]

We have a retail store www.jannaugoneandco.com and a wholesale store www.jannaugoneandco-wholesale.com. We have spent a great deal of time working on the SEO for our retail store and it is ranking very well. The issue is that we also have a Wholesale store that shows up in our SERPs (usually 1-3 results down from the main site). 

Our question is how worried should we be about these two sites competing SEO-wise? The Wholesale site requires wholesalers to login to view prices and orders. 

[PageFly-Victor · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jannaugoneandco ,

This is Victor from PageFly - Shopify Page Builder App.

The login method is a way that blocks indexing for pages on your wholesaler website. With that, Google can't even crawl or index the page. You can check again in Google Search Console if the product pages on the wholesale site are being crawled and indexed or not.

You can play extra safe by adding canonical tags on the wholesale product pages point to the same product on the retail page. Even when Google sees duplicate pages, they will prioritize the retail product pages as the one to show on search results. 

So we might have the retail site and home page of the wholesale site to show up in search results and in my opinion, they are not competing against each other. 

You can try and see which pages are indexed by Google and keep managing them.

Hope it helps!

Victor | PageFly

[PageFly-Victor · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jannaugoneandco ,

This is Victor from PageFly - Shopify Page Builder App.

The login method is a way that blocks indexing for pages on your wholesaler website. With that, Google can't even crawl or index the page. You can check again in Google Search Console if the product pages on the wholesale site are being crawled and indexed or not.

You can play extra safe by adding canonical tags on the wholesale product pages point to the same product on the retail page. Even when Google sees duplicate pages, they will prioritize the retail product pages as the one to show on search results. 

So we might have the retail site and home page of the wholesale site to show up in search results and in my opinion, they are not competing against each other. 

You can try and see which pages are indexed by Google and keep managing them.

Hope it helps!

Victor | PageFly

[Jannaugoneandco]

Thank you so much Victor! We really appreciate that perspective and those suggestions. 

[BrianFawkes · Accepted solution]

Great job with both sites! 

The fact that the two domains appear close by in a query is proof that you know your SEO game - so, you're victims of your own success 🙂 Still, it's not an issue since most of the time, a visitor will end up spending time on both domains. The bounce rate might suffer, but that won't be the case with returning customers.

If you're worried that prospective buyers might get confused when they can't see prices after landing on the wholesale site, perhaps you can place a link to the other site in the introductory section. You can anchor it on one of the keywords in that paragraph. 

[Jannaugoneandco]

Hey Brian - Thank you as well for your thoughts and suggestions. We have taken them to heart appreciate it greatly. 

[Adherence]

I would suggest you look at each site and the nature of the traffic before doing anything drastic like blocking pages from Google. You may be getting two bites of the SEO cherry but confusing wholesale customers who end up on retail and visa-versa. If the wholesale site is generating wholesale-relevant traffic and you block it from google in some way, then you're hurting your efforts. 

It sounds like you need to have a bit of a think about a strategy here. Is a wholesale site even required? Sites often have wholesale pricing but you have to sign up as a wholesale customer and only then do you access specific pricing - rather than go to a whole different site.

[BlogPilot]

Victor is right. Having a login method blocks a lot of your content from the crawlers of search engines. One potential way around this is to create a blog for your wholesale website that is outside of the login method and publicly accessible. This would help boost your SEO without exposing any sensitive information about your wholesale operation.

Blog Pilot can help automate your blog post creation and management for you, ensuring consistency and SEO-optimization, which can also help a great deal. You can check us out here:

https://apps.shopify.com/blog-pilot

Happy to answer any follow up questions about SEO and blogs that you may have. Feel free to reply to this or shoot us a direct message anytime!