When to build a new website?

Same website, new website, or sub-domain?

One of the questions important to anyone that is creating a website, including those that already own and run a well established website, is: 

Is it better to create a new website or sub-domain for new content or is there an advantage to publishing the new content within an existing website?

The SEO aficionado might immediately raise their hand and answer "much better to place the content within an existing website, as that website will already have an established ranking within the search engines.  Therefore, the new content will immediately be viewed as more important by search engines, and subsequently achieve a higher ranking."

While this statement is true, I want you to think back to the section never neglect your visitors! in our Why Search? article (read it if you haven't already). 

Who is the website for - your visitors or a search engine?

What I'm getting at here is that while it may help the ranking of the new content to be placed within an already established website, it will not necessarily make sense for your visitors.  What you should consider of first and foremost is, will the new content clutter the existing website?  Or does it make sense to be placed there.  Put yourself in the shoes of your visitor and imagine what it will be like, surfing to the existing website and finding the new content.  Will it be difficult to find among the existing content?  Or will the new content make the existing content more difficult to find?  How relevant is the new content to the existing content? 

Content relevance is key

You can probably see what I'm getting at here.  It's paramount that your existing content be relevant to your new content, and that both will be easily findable by your visitors.  It makes no sense to include existing content within an established website for the sole purpose of giving it a jump start in the rankings.

Where should your new content go?

So, to answer the question of whether or not new content should be placed within an existing website - the answer is it's up to you.  Keep your visitor in mind, and see what would benefit them most.  In the long run, that's who the search engines are catering to as well.  If you end up building up a new site with the new content, and your visitors are more readily able to find what they're looking for that way, then eventually the search engines will come to the same conclusion.  Remember, search engines don't simply look for established content - they take relevance into account, and are constantly updating their algorithms to make search a more effective experience for their users.  They are targeting user accessibility and experience as well as content relevance.  In both cases, it behooves you to take into consideration where your content should go before publishing it.

How much content will fit within one website?

That being said, it's very possible to contain a large variety of sub-topics within one website.  There's no need to create a minisite for each new topic.  In fact, I urge you to first try and place the content within your existing website, and only if it doesn't fit or doesn't make sense, consider starting a new website devoted to that topic.  And only do so if there's plenty of content to back it up.  The occasional stray article isn't going to kill anyone - and it doesn't make sense to create an entirely new website, or sub-domain, for just a few pages of content.

Using sub-domains to your advantage

As mentioned, if you have a lot of content that won't fit into your website semantically, you can consider opening a sub-domain within your main website to house that content.  Realize that this sub-domain will basically be treated as an independent website by search engines.  However, it will not carry the separation that an entirely new domain name would.  So consider creating a sub-domain to house new content before going with an entirely new domain.  In the eyes of your visitors, the sub-domain will still be a part of your existing website, whereas they may not make that association with a brand new domain.