Just thought I'd shoot an update - according to WPEngine the redirect will always be there. No way around it on their platform.

Howdy Moz,

Over and over we hear of folks using microsites in addition to their main brand for targeting keyword specific niches.  The main point of concern most folks have is either in duplicate content or being penalized by Google, which is also our concern.  However, in one of our niches we notice a lot of competitors have set up secondary websites to rank in addition to the main website (basically take up more room on the SERPS).  They are currently utilizing different domains, on different IPs, on different servers, etc.  We verified because we called and they all rang to the same competitors.

So our thought was why not take the fight to them (so to speak) but with a branding and content strategy.  The company has many good content pieces that we can utilize, like company mottos, missions statements, special projects, community outreach that can be turned into microsites with unique content.

Our strategy idea is the take a company called "ACME Plumbing" and brand for specific keywords with locations like sacramentoplumberwarranty.com where the site's content revolves around plumber warranty info, measures of a good warranty, plumbing warranty news (newsworthy issues), blogs, RCS - you get the idea...and send both referral traffic and link to the main site.

The ideal is to then repeat the process with another company aspect like napaplumbingprojects.com where the content of the site is focused on cool projects, images, RCS, etc. Again, referring traffic and link juice to the main site.

We realize that this adds the amount of RCS that needs to be done, but that's exactly why we're here.  Also, any thoughts of intentionally tying in the brand to the location so you get urls like acmeplumbingsacarmento.com?

I think these are great guidelines and recommendations.  Quick question though - what if a small business has multiple locations and a different phone number at each location?  Would it serve any purpose to have a microsite for these locations which are also branded accordingly?

Another strategy I see commonly used are subdomains under the main umbrella site.  Any thoughts on that one?  The client really wants to take up more space on the search results.  So I want to make sure that we do a legit and unique approach to this.  It may be that we instead create niche landing pages on the main site like:

acmeplumbing.com/sacramentoplumbingwarranty

Where this page is a specific section dedicated to plumbing warranties, faqs, warranty changes, newsworthy stories, etc.  That way we continue the size of the site and keep our efforts focused in 1 place.  One our main challenges is that competitors are finding ranking opportunities using keyword specific urls and different google voice phone numbers attached to the same business and location.

Another very helpful answer - thank you.  Moving forward, I still think the best approach is one website at the end of the day.  After all, the saying is that it is better to mine one mine deep than to mine several at the same time.

In this particular niche, service industries like plumbing have exact match domains with less notable content.  We're still working on the ability to offset this advantage they appear to have.

Thanks again!