Organizational ambidexterity has become increasingly important in both management practices and academic researches. Although ambidexterity has addressed pursuing exploration and exploitation simultaneously in order to realize their complementary effect, there are two limits among the existing researches. Firstly, the meanings of exploration and exploitation have remained obscure. While exploration and exploitation are the core concepts of organizational ambidexterity, they have been put forward as two ways of organizational learning. Based on this, scholars have treated organizational ambidexterity as balancing the learning of technical knowledge and market knowledge respectively, leaving the interaction between these two domains underexplored. Secondly, the boundary of organizational ambidexterity calls for further understanding. Derived from the structur separation of big companies in Western countries, the mechanism of how to achieve organizational ambidexterity has been the focus in academic researches. In addition to structural ambidexterity, other scholars have discussed context ambidexterity and leadership ambidexterity as well. However, it is difficult for small-medium enterprises (SMEs) to achieve ambidexterity by these mechanisms. Moreover, pursuing exploration and exploitation simultaneously could even bring about the resource burden and internal conflict. In consequence, the empirical results about whether SMEs’ organizational ambidexterity is beneficial or not have been inconsistent. To overcome the above-mentioned shortcomings, this paper aims at exploring the effects of SMEs’ three strategies, i.e. specialization, single domain ambidexterity and cross-domain ambidexterity, on their performance. Specifically, the exploration and exploitation in this paper are two different ways of learning concurrently existing in the technical domain and the market domain. SMEs may explore or exploit both domains, and such kind of exploration and exploitation are termed as specialization strategy. While single domain ambidexterity means SMEs pursue exploration and exploitation simultaneously within the technical or market domain, cross-domain ambidexterity stands for balancing exploration and exploitation between domains, i.e., “technology exploration and market exploitation” or “technology exploitation and market exploration.” Based on a survey of 197 SMEs, the results reveal the different effects of the three strategies above. Firstly, SMEs’ specialization and cross-domain ambidexterity are positively associated with performance. Secondly, as to the single domain organizational ambidexterity, market domain ambidexterity is negatively associated with performance. Thirdly, the ambidexterity in the technical domain does not have any significant effect on performance. The Wald coefficient test illustrates a framework of how to balance exploration and exploitation for SMEs. On a whole, the results of this research imply that the single domain ambidexterity does not benefit SMEs. On the contrary, cross-domain ambidexterity is a source of competitive advantage.