I plan to provide content/services across multiple (similar and related) subcategories. In general, users will only be interested in the one subcategory related to their needs.
Users will be searching for the term that would be part of the domain, subdomain or URL.
There’s three possible strategies:
primary-domain.tld, with subdomains:
keyword-one.primary-domain.tld
keyword-two.primary-domain.tld
primary-domain.tld, with directories:
primary-domain.tld/keyword-one
primary-domain.tld/keyword-two
or each keyword gets its own domain:
keyword-one-foo.tld
keyword-two-foo.tld
From an SEO point of view, which is the best approach to take? I gather that having one overall domain would mean any links to any of the subdomains or directories weight for the whole site, helping the ranking of each subdomain/directory. However, supposedly if the domain, keywords and title all match nicely with the content, that would rank highly as well. So I’m unsure as to the best approach to take.
The only answer I think anyone could give you here, is that you can’t know. Modern search engine algorithms are pretty sophisticated, and to know which marginally different naming methodology is better is impossible to know without inside knowledge.
Also even if you did know, it could change in the future. Or perhaps it doesn’t even come to the eqation at all, as it is open for abuse.
99% of the time it comes down to content. Originality, quality etc etc.