Content is and forever will be king. There’s no arguing that. From video content to blog creation, a website without engaging material will soon plunder into the lowest ranking of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – and that is exactly the opposite of your marketing goals, now and probably forever. Content is what drives traffic, enticing viewers to your brand and encouraging them to take on your services, purchase your products and interact as your social community.
A microsite could be a great solution to narrowing down your content and delivering it in a consistent, on-brand and educational platform – all directed to your ideal target audience. But what is a microsite exactly?
A microsite is a brand-specific website, that could consist of a full site map, or could even be limited to a single web page. Microsites are used by companies to promote their events, campaigns and even promote their services and products.
Seeing as the content on a microsite is generally tailored to a specific need or target, the site’s URL is usually an off-shoot from the original website of the company or brand. Hence the recognisable, yet independent subdomain usage.
For example, if your company is hoping to recruit a large number of people for a new project, an HR microsite engaging with job seekers could be far more beneficial than posting any information on the mother website. This could also be done for a newly launched sub-brand, a new pillar that doesn’t quite fit your brand’s target market or any other criteria that could decrease traffic potential on your original site.
What are the benefits of launching a microsite?
Launching a microsite, while it can be seen as an initial expense and a few hours of in-house or freelance effort, should most definitely be seen as an investment. A microsite doesn’t generally feature an ‘About Us’, ‘Meet the Team’ or ‘Company History’ page, rather it delves straight into the mission and engages with the right audience for the right means. Back-linking to the mother site could be a great way of strengthening reliability and credibility as well as serve as a great Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) technique, pleasing not only your human audience but also Google’s robots. Microsites are a good way to go whenever you are:
Launching a New Product (physical or digital) or Service
This will ensure your interested users are kept on the straight and narrow, unable to divert their attention to any other service or product you offer; this could result in more conversions.
Hoping to Generate Targeted Leads
Quality leads are what count and users directing their attention to a niche website have a much higher chance of enquiring about your offer, starting a free trial and eventually converting as a valuable user.
Expecting to Target a Specific Niche or Geographical Location
In some cases, your service or product could be available across different markets, perhaps start-up companies as well as big corporations, or maybe even local and international markets.
4Sight’s international portfolio is powered by marketing experts that are able to differentiate between necessity and interaction, creating microsites for clients with different needs and expectations across the globe.
Promoting an Event, Campaign or Initiative
When promoting a campaign, there’s only so much traffic that you require to convert and make your efforts a success. So why would you eliminate all your website traffic for one event? Don’t give your users an opportunity to ignore you, with all the internet distractions it’s already a highly competitive sphere.
Looking to Stand Out from the Mother Company
Microsites give new company initiatives the ability to stand out and speak in that tailored tone of voice and specific design while keeping faithful to the base company’s standards and motives. Sometimes a sort of distance from the mother brand could help a sister brand soar to unexpected heights.
Microsites can provide a myriad of opportunities and benefits, SEO niche keywords used on your original website won’t perform as well as they would on a targeted microsite, designed and managed to interact with a certain target market. Microsites are also beneficial in the generation of authentic leads, ideal for brand awareness and key in conveying a technical message that would otherwise fall on deaf ears. But there’s more to understand when it comes to SEO and microsites.
How do you optimise a microsite with the best SEO techniques?
Thinking that a microsite will boost your overall SEO presence is a mistake. While the few backlinks you will attach to your company page will prove to strengthen your microsite, there are only very few possibilities for 3rd party links.
A back-dated approach to SEO would imply that the more microsite you create, the higher your chances of appearing on the 1st SERP would be – but that’s not the case anymore, Google’s bots have caught on to that and look down on it quite a bit.
The short-lived cycle of a microsite creates redundancy and does not strengthen the company’s original page as much as it used to in past years. In fact, black hat SEO is a great detriment on ranking and will push any sites down on ranking as soon as this sort of technique is attempted.
The only way to keep your SEO credibility ranking, and your microsite functioning as the niche platform it was created to be, is to keep your SEO techniques legitimate and within good practice requirements.
At 4Sight we are constantly up-to-date with all the SEO practices and work with experts whose main professional focus is brand optimisation. So if you’re looking to create a microsite, but expect to keep your company website at the top of its ranking ability, give us a call, we’ll help you map out your next steps for microsite success.
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