One website to cater to everybody?

The cost of building and maintaining a website has dropped significantly over the last few years - so much so that it’s now affordable to have multiple websites – or microsites - representing your business. Deploying more than one website has several business level advantages:

Keep Your Online Visitors Focused

Each microsite can be positioned to serve a specific segment of your overall market; the content within each can be focused on one core concept or product category. Visitors to microsites are not distracted with navigation and information that’s not directly relevant to their reasons for being there in the first place.

Help The Search Engines Help You

The more focused the content of a site, the easier it is for the search engines to deliver qualified traffic to it. Search engines love unambiguous, niche level content – it makes their objective of delivering relevant search results all the more easier.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

The look and feel of a microsite can be tailored to appeal directly to its target audience. By contrast, one-size-fit-all websites are broadly designed to appeal to every possible stakeholder group that might visit; the end result is a site that speaks to everybody, but to nobody in particular.

Keyword Rich Domain Names

Microsites can each be assigned keyword rich domain names in line with their marketplace positioning. Search engines place weight in the keywords within a website’s URL when serving results for specific keyword queries.

To view examples of keyword rich domain names, click here to see Google's page one results for the keyword query 'pest control'. All 10 of the organic results have the word 'pest' in the domain name, and about half of them have both, 'pest' and 'control' in there.

Value Your Web Based Real Estate

Established websites that command significant volumes of quality traffic are an important and valuable business asset. Microsites allow an organisation to spin off or sell a facet of its business operation as well as the website that’s associated with it. Potential buyers will see increased value in any business unit that has an established online presence (and Page Rank).

Think Global & Local

If serving overseas markets, separate websites are essential. Search engines tend to serve localised websites over internationally based ones; search engines determine ‘local’ by looking at a website’s domain name country suffix, (e.g. ‘.au’ for Australia), and which country the website is hosted in. Furthermore, individual microsites for individual countries allow each to be culturally localised in respect to language, colours, imagery, currency, spelling and pricing (see International Marketing).