How to Host Microsites: Mission Critical or Six of One / Half Dozen of the Other?
-
Hello, fellow Mozzers! Been racking my brain. Thanks for your help on this one!
I am in the process of putting together several microsites for our marketing agency. The sites feature similar theme and design elements, but are focused on delivering a customized industry-specific visitor experience with unique navigation, brand messaging, services, case studies, etc.
I am struggling with whether I should host as entirely separate websites, as subdomains of the parent site, or as separate WP installs in subfolders of the main domain.
I have been leaning toward the sub-folder option to share domain authority and keep our SEO efforts consolidated. But I am also concerned that the microsite "home pages" will underperform as sub-folder pages, versus being an actual home page of a unique domain or sub-domain.
Is this a six-of-one or half-dozen of the other situation, or are there some important considerations I'm missing here?
Thank you for your help here!
-
Happy to help, good luck!
-
Thanks, Dave. Great points. Thanks for the feedback!
-
Thanks, Justin. Good advice. The important thing to me was the ability to deliver unique brand and user experience, including navigation menu, content, colors, logo. I've been putting things together on my own thus far without the technical programming know how, but now that you bring this up, I am sure that my developer will be able to help me build this out under a single theme and install, no problem. Appreciate the thought! Andrew
-
If the main website is in WordPress, I recommend creating a new page template in your existing WP installation, and using that to create your landing pages and microsites.
Adding another subdomain or a separate WordPress install is only going to give you headaches. Analytics, updates, plugins, etc., all get more complicated when you do that. It may seem like a quick fix, but you'd only be making trouble for yourself later.
Better to spend the time up front creating new page templates on your existing WP domain.
Here's an article on creating new page templates: http://codex.wordpress.org/Page_Templates
Here are a couple of articles on creating new sidebars:
-
Hey Alaniz,
I would run the subfolder route for two reasons.
1. Branding. You can leverage all of you brand equity under one domain but still let people know that you specialize in marketing for the listed industries. Your case studies and blog will show you know your stuff. People will probably think each site is a separate business. You will want your customers to know you service other industries so they can (hopefully) refer others. So maybe you do a killer job marketing for the legal side and the client has a buddy in medical and they can easily refer the friend to the one website.
2. SEO time and effort. Starting from scratch on six sites in competitive markets will take some serious time and resources to get them to generate traffic. Focusing on one domain will pass the link equity on to the other pages. I would rather manage one site versus six.
I love seeing strategy questions on here, those are always the tough ones.
-
Hi, Eugene. Thanks for the response. I'll try to explain it better.
I would like to create a website experience that is specific to several sub-specialties of our marketing agency (tech, medical, legal, etc). Each "microsite" has unique brand messaging, navigation, styling, case studies, blog.
I am trying to figure out the best practice for hosting and site architecture. For instance, here are my considerations:
Main Parent Site: www.abcmarketing.com
Separate Sites Option: www.abcmedicalmarketing.com
Sub-domain Option: medical.abcmarketing.com
Sub-Folder Option: abcmarketing.com/medicalThe Sub-folder option seems to be the best way to consolidate efforts and maintain authority for one domain, as you said. But I'm not sure if there are any other considerations that I'm missing here. For instance, will the sub-folder hosted microsites rank as well as if they were hosted and maintained separately? Is there anything that Google will potentially not like about this? Or is this simply and clearly the best way to proceed?
Thanks for your help!
-
Not sure I'm following you, but I don't think it's ever a good idea to have different micro sites hosted all on the same host with the same IP. Why not build up the domain authority for ONE domain. I remember herding Google not liking the new subdomain craze too, but that was just on a podcast. Sorry I don't understand your question better.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Organic Brand Clicks/Traffic Drop - Why?
Hi Moz Community, I've been reviewing Search Console and have been noticing that there has been a consistent drop in brand clicks. The overall number of keywords (especially for the top 2 pages) have been increasing, according to SEMRUSH, however, traffic and sales are still in decline. There are no algorithmic and manual penalties, in addition, paid search activity has been increasing in the leadup to Christmas. Has anyone experienced this and potentially advise how to diagnose and resolve this issue?
Branding | | rec1230 -
Copy/pasting the article from another website and referencing correctly not to get penalized
Hi all I am looking at copy/pasting an article from another website which is very relevant to my business, is there a standard practise/best practise for SEO to do this and ensure Google doesn't think i am plagerizing content etc.. Link to source down the bottom? Using Quotations... making a page noindex or no follow etc?
Branding | | IsaCleanse0 -
Niche sites migration into one authority site
I have multiple websites within the health niche. All 3 sites are about different topics: protein powder, superfoods, and sustainable products. I am thinking about migrating those 3 sites into 1 big site, to establish more authority and for branding purposes. But since those domains are exact match domains, and those exact keywords are pretty high volume, I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Will this be a good idea from a traffic/conversion/seo standpoint? Or should I make a header on top where people can 'switch' between those 3 sites? Or just leave them seperate?
Branding | | mrdjdevil0 -
What is your thoughts on the proper way for one brand to promote a sub-brand.
Greetings fellow Mozers! How Do Major Companies Promote Their New Sub-Brands I'm curious to see everyone's thoughts on how and what is the best process to promoting your companies new brand. I see companies like Wayfair.com promoting their sub-brand "All Modern" and "Wayfair supply" (maybe "sub-brand" isn't the best term) in the top left of the page as a link. I believe this is only a SEO play because they are only outbound links to the brand website. If you go to "All Modern" there are no links back to Wayfair. I then looked at a company like Gap.com and notice that all of their other brands are promoted on the website and are also interchangeably linked to one another. Does anyone have any thoughts on the best way to link and or promote your smaller brand that could potentially turn it into a Major Brand. Do you think this is just a SEO linking play. I'm curious to see everyone's thoughts
Branding | | rpaiva0 -
A 2014 perspective on using Awards/Badges for backlinks?
Hi all, Just wanted to get a modern-day perspective on this tactic as a method of obtaining back links. We've recently (legitimately) polled our customer base both on social media and through our email database (40,000+ people) to rank a bunch of different locations / attractions and put together Top 10 lists based on the results. I was intending to put together "awards" badges and provide them to the operators who won along with a back link from the badge to the main article page with the finalists. I thought I'd ask here though to see what public opinion is on this as a link building tactic in 2014 as all the resources I could find were a couple of years old. Bear in mind we aren't paying them anything at all, but it is still an obvious attempt to both give them their recognition as well as add to our link profile. Do you think in this day and age that this kind of action would invoke any Google penalties? And if not, is there any indication why they wouldn't pass as much juice as regular text links? Thanks for any and all feedback.
Branding | | ExperienceOz1 -
Authorship/publisher markup - Author photo vs. company logo
I'm trying to get a company logo to show up next to the search results for a search on [company name] AND a separate author photo to show next to the About page of the author of the same site for a search on [author name] There is author markup on the company's "About" page and Google's structured data testing tool shows that that page is correctly configured to show the author pic. There is publisher markup on the home page and the tool shows that the page is correctly configured to show the company logo. However, no company logo shows up in the search results for the [company name] search--just an author pic next to the "about" page for the [author name] search. if I add author markup to the homepage in addition to the publisher markup, I get the author pic showing up for both [author name] and [company name] searches. How is anyone making this work? Thanks.
Branding | | Chris.Menke0 -
Can we publish two guest posts on one domain with same pen name but different linking website?
Can we publish two guest posts on one domain with same pen name but different linking website? Actually I have been doing guest posts with pen name “Jane Andrew” for “abc.com”(bit old and well performing website). Now I need to post for a new website “xyz.com” on some old domains (where I have already published my articles) so the situation is that I want domains and pen name to remain same but linking website would be different. I had few questions in my mind regarding that and I would be grateful if you help me getting the required information. Is it right from SEO, branding and marketing point of view? How Google interprets this? Is there any harm for the old well performing website or for the new one? And also both websites are owned and managed by the same owner.
Branding | | shaz_lhr0 -
Using Multiple Locations for Google Business/Maps
Hey MOZers, I currently work for a company with several other offices in other countries. Is it possible to set-up Google 'Business' and Google 'Maps' pages so when a user in a given country queries 'our business' on either Google 'Search' or Google 'Maps' they will receive the relevant business information for that country. For example, if an internet user in Canada enters a query for 'our business' in Canada (and we have an office in Canada) is there anyway to set up our Google Business page and Google Maps page so that user receives the contact information for the Canada office, rather than the US office? Conversely, if someone in the United States enters a search query for 'our business' is there a way to set it up so that the user receives our address in the states?
Branding | | NiallSmith0