Microsites vs. one site
-
My client has created a product that he wants to market to two, very different, audiences. The goal is to funnel them through the site and get them to purchase. My question is about the best SEO strategy on how to do this effectively.
Since they are distinct audiences with little in common we've recommended building two microsites, and optimizing each with unique content and different keyword focus. I realize it will be harder to optimize two sites rather than one, but it seems to make sense from a user perspective. But once the users goes to a "non-audience specific" page, like any page that is about the product or company and not about the audience, should we build yet a third website that houses the "company/product pages" and channel the conversions there in order to avoid having duplicate content on the two other sites? Or should we put the same "company pages" on both the Audience A and Audience B websites, only vary the text so it doesn't look like duplicate content. Or is the microsite strategy flawed all together?
Please keep in mind this is a brand new product and it has national scope. There is no local focus. We will be building their rankings entirely from scratch. I REALLY appreciate any insights you may have. We have been going around and around about this. Thanks
-
Agree with the others here, two or three sites definitely are a lot harder to maintain, and a properly-structured website can cater to different types of audiences, even when they vary a lot. You'll want to be very careful with the UX and perhaps work with some conversion rate optimisation people as well to segregate the audiences and not confuse the sales process for either, but this should be possible, especially if you focus your marketing for each audience to drive traffic to pages where there is no initial cross-over (shared navigation, etc.). I am guessing since I have not seen either product or preliminary site (if there is one), but I believe that one site would be better given that there will be shared pages, such as company information.
If you were to create two sites, I suggest canonicalising the duplicate content to one version of the site, most likely the one with the larger user base or higher potential return. E.g., www.site.com/company-information and www.b2bsite.com/company-information are canonicalised to www.site.com/company-information if www.site.com is the primary business interest.
-
I have 3 sites selling the same product,
BUT I got my first site to the top of Bing and Google for all my keywords before I bothered making a second site, and like wise I waited till I was dominating the serps before I bothered with a third.
Get your first site to rank before trying to be tricky.
-
Makes sense. I forgot to mention that each audience type will have it's own blog. Is it okay to house more than one blog under a single domain? Thanks for the feedback, guys!
-
What you are describing sounds like a mess to maintain. Three potential sites? If you're interested in usability, create one site and build it so it speaks to the personas you're targeting. Like bstone said, build one and put all your effort behind that site. By splitting up the sites, you will be doubling the effort and neither will reach their full potential. In some cases you will even be competing against yourself.
-
My suggestion would be to stay with one site, and set up pages or categories within your site to address different audiences. Building more than one site will require you to do backlinking and social channel strategies for each one. Build the mother ship and point everything there. Good examples to follow are Amazon, Walmart (Who has recently jumped into the rankings over the last few years).
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
-
Is anyone aware of stats stating how many people abandon pages the deeper they get in a site?
For example, let's say someone enters via a landing page, and instead of having a form there is a button to a form. What percentage of people will click the button and fill out the form vs if the form was right there on the page? Basically, I am trying to figure out what percentage of users do websites lose for every click a user makes on the site.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
Grid view vs. List view
Hi I work on an ecommerce site and wondered if anyone had tested grid view vs. list view on product listing pages? We use list view, but I think grid view might work better. Thanks
Conversion Rate Optimization | | BeckyKey0 -
Site Redesign Leads Dropped
One of my clients recently had his site redesigned. He wanted to change the design completely, I did offer advice on aspects relating to the redesign, I think its fair to say that he didn't follow all of my advice. PPC still running as usual and rankings still OK but the leads have gone down. Most of the leads come via the phone. I have suggested a number of ways to establish what has gone wrong including surveying his existing customers, comparing old and new designs etc...The client isn't keen on these methods. I'm hoping someone has some direct experience and can offer some direction as to how best to proceed? Justin
Conversion Rate Optimization | | GrouchyKids0 -
Figuring out why sales drop significantly from one day to another
Hi all, We're running an eCommerce site and are using Moz to track our organic results i primarily we are using the Rank tracker and On page analysis tools. One strange issue that we experience on our website is sales dropping from one day to the next unexplainably (to us anyway). For example, one day (could be any day of the week or weekend) we'll make £1,000 of sales, the next £200 - the following might be back up to £1,000. I've tried looking for patterns in traffic, but oddly even on the days when we have poor sales we still tend to have almost as much traffic. We also use adwords, which account for about 50% of sales - on some of the poor days our spend on adwords is down, on others it's not. If the spend is down I could make a fair assumption that our competitors are playing around with their bids. I'm interesting in trying to determine why we have such irregular sales patterns. If they dropped 10/20% I could quite easily put it down to any number of factors - even the weather for example, however drops of 80/90% seem strange. I don't really know where to look for the answers - my first thought was that on the poor days I should check whether our organic rankings had dropped significantly overnight - but the Moz Rank Tracker only updates once per week, so perhaps there is an alternative way someone could suggest? I'd be really interested to hear from any of you that might have been through similar struggles, or, have some ideas that might help us get to the bottom of the fluctuation in sales. Thanks in advance for your time. Kind regards,
Conversion Rate Optimization | | SimplyPlastic
Al0 -
Question regarding eCommerce sites, relative URLs and secuirty certificates
We recently installed a new SSL certificate on an ecommerce site. Our IT Director is insisting that all pages on the site must be coded in such a way so that the address bar maintains a green background when a visitor is navigating the site after navigating to a secure page or logging in. I have worked on many ecommerce sites and never has this been an issue. Amazon does not use the green bar....but they are Amazon. In order for this to work, he is insisting that all internal URLs be coded as relative instead of absolute. How bad is this for SEO or does it really not matter that much? How crucial is it for trust and security? Opinions welcome!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | danatanseo0 -
Conversion Rate - site feedback
Hi We gave a website a bit of a facelift last nov with the aim of increasing its position within Search Engines and getting it to begin making sales. The site: www.funkyfootstools.com is now moving in the right direction for its keyphrases, footstools and ottomans although it still needs some work. The issue I have is that from the visitors that come to the site, the stats prove they have a look around, they are just not purchasing - I am not sure if this is because of the layout, ie. usability or if there is something else. Any ideas & feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Carl
Conversion Rate Optimization | | keane-1145170 -
Ideal product page conversion/retention rate for eCommerce sites
Hi SEOmoz-ers, I was wondering if anyone has data regarding product page abandonment rate (% of potential customers that leave the site after seeing product pages) for websites like Overstock, REI or Zappos? As you may know the above mentioned sites do an exceptional job with product pages. It would be helpful to know what some of the leaders in this space are achieving in terms of conversion rate. What is your personal opinion about this? Thanks,
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Kush_VMI
Kush0 -
Page Title Tags - SEO vs CRO ?
Hi everyone, Thanks to what seems to be a recent(ish) algo change in Google, some of our more targeted deeper pages are ranking for search terms where before only our homepage would rank. This is of course great however I am a little worried that some of the page titles of our internal pages are a little short, for example our main departments (we are an ecommerce store) are titles 'Department Name | Liberty Games' so for example 'Pool Tables | Liberty Games'. I have heard varying reports on what to do with the title tag, I have heard to keep the most relevant keywords to the left of the tag, which we have done, I have also heard that shorter is better. I am just a bit concerned that our tags are looking a little stumpy in the serps alongside other results which are longer (although admittedly a bit keyword stuffed). So (eventually) my question is, will short titles harm my click-through rate ? but are shorter titles better for SEO ? If longer is better are there any recommendations about what I could add to these titles that could potentially help click-throughs and natural rankings ? Many thanks, Stuart
Conversion Rate Optimization | | stukerr1