It’s so tempting, when you’ve got a special product or event coming up, or you just want to raise the profile of a particular service you may offer, to consider creating a microsite.
But simply put… don’t.
There are many reasons why microsites are not the best option, and there’s an alternative that should be easier to execute, less costly and more effective in a shorter space of time, but we’ll get to that in a sec.
Why you should steer clear of microsites
The main reason is that, if you’re doing your main site SEO properly, you’ve worked really hard to build its profile and authority in whatever field you’re in.
And when you build a microsite on a separate domain, you’re relinquising all that hard-earned SEO capital… starting from scratch to try and build favour with Google could take months, by which time your microsite offering may be redundant anyway.
You’re also ‘diluting’ your company’s internal linking authority – suddenly you’re linking out to and in from a microsite that has no SEO value yet, and you’re also leading potential customers away from your main site…that’s just not good practice.
Plus, microsites can be costly projects – you’re basically building a whole new site from scratch which comes with a raft of planning, developing, testing and launching costs, and beyond that, hosting and maintenance costs that sit outside of your existing site costs.
So what is the alternative?
You’ll be pleased to hear that there are two suitable options you could try instead.
1. Build the ‘microsite’ inside your main site
Plan what you want to promote, and get your web design company to set up a page or pages within your main site’s domain. So for example, instead of creating a new site such as www.mygreatnewitem.com, create it on www.myexistingdomain.com/mygreatnewitem
That way, you’re using your existing SEO credentials to boost and underpin your new product or service.
You can still build it with a whole new ‘journey’, goal-orientated flow or information that leads visitors to a different action than other actions on your site, but it’s using the best of your existing site to be effective from launch date.
2. Use the ‘Landing Page’ technique
Instead of building a microsite, build the information you want to promote into a new page on your website, and then create an external, standalone Landing Page with very single-purpose, goal-orientated copy to lead people (via paid promotion campaigns) to that section of your site.
If you need help setting up new site areas, marketing campaigns or marketing strategies contact us at Realnet.