Last week I spent some time speaking with Jess Dennis of Red Shoes PR about the firm's
upcoming seminar, Bottom Line: Social Media for Business. (If you're near Appleton, WI on June 4, stop by -- I'm speaking!)
When we spoke, Jess explained
that she and her business partners were trying to figure out whether to
put the event website on a new domain (a microsite), or make it a page
within their existing site (www.redshoespr.com).
Because they were
hosting the event in conjunction with the Fox Cities Chamber of
Commerce, they wanted to create some distance between
the event brand and their own brand, so they were leaning towards a
microsite on a new domain.
I agreed with their assessment.
I was fired up about the event when I got off the phone, so I turned
to one of my colleagues who sits next to me here at HubSpot, and
explained the situation. I got an unexpectedly sharp reaction:
"Microsite -- why would they want to do that?"
Then he went on to explain the basic problem: Microsites can be SEO liabilities.
Think
about it. You spend years building links and optimizing pages on your
main site. You build up some Google juice, you start ranking for some
great terms. Then a new project comes along and because it has its own
brand identity, the powers that be decide it needs to be on a separate
domain.
Goodbye Google juice.
Instead of building on the SEO
authority you worked so hard to accrue, you have to start building
it all over again. And in the mean time, your new microsite isn't going
to rank well.
Of course, there are circumstances in which a
microsite makes sense. For example, if you're trying to build a new,
long-lasting brand, a microsite is probably the right way to go.
When
we set up the website for the Inbound Marketing Summit last year, we
knew we wanted to keep the name and build it into a brand. So we went
with a microsite.
That decision cost us search engine traffic in the
short term, but it's now helping New Marketing Labs, the company that
purchased the Summit from us earlier this year.
Microsites also make sense if you care more about the site's unique brand and user experience than about search engine optimization.
So what's the
takeaway?
Simple. The next time you're considering setting up a
microsite, ask yourself this: Is the new site a permanent brand I want
to invest in? And, if that's the case, am I willing to take an SEO
hit in the short term?
If the answer to either of those questions is no, you probably shouldn't go with microsite on its own domain.
What do you think? What reasons to use or not to use microsites am I not considering?
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