One Company - Two separate Websites (About & Career)

Question

I'd like to learn more about the case of having two domains linked to two (content-wise) completely different websites representing a single company in one location.

The existing website contains information about the company, its products and open jobs with a link to the new website.

The new website (with a new domain) however contains only information about working for the company and again, open positions. It contains a lot more info about the company as an employer than the existing general website as well as many unique images. It runs WordPress with the SEO Yoast plugin and is optimized for the three keywords, which are the company's name, the word career and the town it's located. I've also taken care of performance, Sitemap, Search Console and general WordPress settings but not Google MyBusiness, as it only counts for one domain. Now for these keywords it ranks pretty good and lands a spot on the 5th search result (2nd in Bing).

1. But what can be done to rank it better for other keywords (containing the company's name) too?

2. How can I "tell" Google that this new site is a part of the company and an extension to the existing website?

Answer 1

The signals that Google may use to determine if sites are from the same company:

• They have the same domain registration contacts
• They link to each other
• They use the same logo, color scheme, and general look
• They have the same copyright statement
• They have the same privacy policy (or both link to the central one)
• They use the same SSL certificate (SAN with multiple domains), or each have a class 2 certificate registered by the same verified organization
• The same owners have registered both sites in Google Search Console
• They use the same Google Analytics tracking property

The more of these you do, the better the chance that Google will treat the two sites as one.

It is also common practice to put the careers site on a subdomain. If your main site is www.example.com then it is common to have careeers.example.com instead of using a separate domain name. Having all the content under one domain is a much stronger signal to Google than anything I've listed above. Using a subdomain allows the careers center to be hosted with a third party just like using a separate domain. You can still market the separate careers domain, but it would redirect to the subdomain.