SEO-Ward

It seems to be desire of marketing people to have microsites for every conceivable part of a business, every single campaign. Of course it makes sense, you can tailor the microsite to exactly the niche you’re targeting, buy a new KID (keyword in domain), you can get your message across without any problems, have a great conversion funnel.

Awesome, you’ve made your microsite…Now what, well of course you market it, you link build, you exploit social trends and sites and if your site is truly incredible, you’ll get thousands of links, millions of likes and shares and your microsite will be a big success, what a great project.

Now, think about this carefully, what percentage of microsites do you think actually achieve that sort of penetration and how many do you think struggle? I would say the majority of microsites, unless they are truly spectacular will need paid traffic.

So the questions is, are microsites good for your SEO and your rankings in the SERPS?

Of course not, in fact, I would say that creating microsites are detrimental to your rankings and here’s why.

Assuming like most SEO’s and digital marketers, the majority of your efforts go into marketing a website, building links, creating buzz, creating and adding quality content. Now by creating a microsite, you’ve just doubled your workload if you want your microsite to rank organically.

Now imagine if you made your microsite as part of your overall website, add the awesome content you’ve created to your actual site, insert it into your navigation and then market it. All the lovely incoming links will be applying to your main site rather than a microsite so you would be marketing both as one as the link equity coming to your microsite spreads around the main site. People might go on to look at different things on your site as well, you might increase your cross sell opportunity.

If you must make a microsite for your product, make sure it sits on your main domain, even if you have to subdomain it (not my preferred option)

The only way I would suggest that external microsites make sense is:

1. You’re a huge well known brand launching a new product
2. You have a huge PPC budget and aren’t afraid to spend it
3. You have great social marketers in place

About Jim Seward

Jim Seward has written 46 post in this blog.

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