Microsites And SEO

Microsites and SEO

Microsites, under the right circumstances, can be a great marketing strategy. Big multinational companies like Coca Cola frequently use microsites to drive awareness of a new advertising campaign or product launch.

However, from an SEO perspective, microsites are not usually a recommended strategy. Why? Because if your primary concern is to boost your organic presence in the search engine results, it’s almost always better to host content on a new subdomain or subdirectory instead of a new microsite for SEO.

Many companies think launching a microsite (or several microsites) is a great way to dominate the SERPs. In theory, if you were able to own position number one with your main website, and own positions number 2-10 with microsites, you could have complete ownership of the search engine results page and capture a ton of organic traffic.

In reality, this is never going to happen. For one thing, Google is unlikely to show more than a couple search results from a single domain on the same results page. But more importantly, it’s equally unlikely that you would be able to build up enough authority for several microsites to have them rank alongside your primary domain. Building domain authority takes time and effort. You can’t simple create a new microsite – or several – and trust that you will have a ton of new traffic coming in.

One scenario where businesses might attempt to use microsites is when they operate several shops in different locations and want to rank for geo-specific keywords. For example, if you ran a designer jewellery shop with locations in Carlton, Fitzroy and Collingwood, you might think it’s wise to set up separate microsites with keyword-optimised domains like designerjewellerycarlton.com.au, designerjewelleryfitzroy.com.au and designerjewellerycollingwood.com.au.

The problem with this is approach is that you’re spreading the value Google assigns to your brand too thin. Why split authority between several sites when you could earn it all on one? No matter how much traffic and links each of your individual microsites earns, you could earn so much more authority for your brand if you concentrated all that content on a single domain.

There are three main reasons why relying on microsites is a bad idea.

1. You’re diluting your domain authority and spreading your content too thin.Whether you know it or not, your primary website has been building up authority since day one; if you decide to create microsites, none of them will benefit from that authority. Instead of having one really strong website with great content and an awesome link profile, you will end up with a bunch of weak sites with thin content and mediocre link profiles.
2. It costs a lot of money and effort.Registering, hosting and developing several websites is expensive – not to mention time-consuming. There are probably more valuable ways you can invest your time and dollars into your business.
3. It creates a bad user experience. Users don’t generally appreciate jumping around from site to site to find the content they are looking for. Housing all your content on one domain provides a better user experience, which is an important factor in modern SEO.

Instead of placing new content on a new microsite, we recommend that our clients create a subdirectory on their existing site. Not only is this approach easier to manage, it also has much clearer SEO benefits.

Thus, returning to our previous example, instead of designerjewelleryfitzroy.com.au, and designerjewellerycollingwood.com.au, we would set the site up with separate pages like designerjewellery.com.au/fitzroy and designerjewellery.com.au/collingwood. From an SEO perspective, the major benefit of setting up your site this way is that your content still benefits from the authority of the root domain. Instead of diluting your authority, you are reinforcing it.

So does it ever make sense to create a microsite for your brand for SEO? The short answer is that unless you’re a big brand with tons of resources to devote to it, stay away from microsites. Focus instead on building authority for your primary domain and diversifying your site with great content. If you would like help with this, feel free to visit us at SEO Company Melbourne. We provide professional and proven SEO results so more people visit your website and brand.