I hope this question is not too specific to be answered here.The situation is that a husband and wife run two businesses:a plant nursery anda garden design serviceI can see a reason for keeping these sites separate, as they focus on different keywords (garden design near xyz vs plant nursery near xyz).But I can also see a reason to combine them as they are both about a very similar subject: gardening.Being business owners they understandably want to keep costs down and want to only pay for a single website.Will it be beneficial (for SEO) to combine the two business to a single website, or best to keep them apart?
Two related business (plant nursery & garden designer), same owner. One website or two?
seo
From a pure SEO perspective, start both businesses on the same website, because it takes content and size to rank. By starting together, they will support each other in attracting traffic which might be coming for one reason and be interested in the other.It is ok to have two phone numbers too, one for each service. Users won't complain if they are satisfied in their queries. They won't complain because these are not separated websites.If necessary, you can always spin one activity on another domain name later and use proper redirects to pass the link juice between each site and keep the accumulated SEO benefits so far. 