May 26th, 2010 by Nick

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Microsites are small versions of your main website that are centered around a certain topic.  So, for example, if you’re a lawyer who does divorce and immigration, instead of having both practice areas on JoeSmithLawFirm.com, you’ll have AtlantaDivorceLawyer.com and AtlantaImmigrationAttorney.com.

Is having multiple websites a good idea? As it turns out, smart people disagree.  Read on to hear both sides of the story.

Drugstore.com’s microsites

Drugstore.com, an online retailer, recently implemented its own microsite strategy by launching Beauty.com, VisionDirect.com, SexualWellBeing.com, and other domains.  Obviously the capable strategists at DrugStore.com think this is a good idea.  However, ex-Googler and prolific writer/speak Vanessa Fox disagrees.  In her blog post “Microsites. A Bad Idea Most of the Time,” she thoroughly explains why she thinks microsites are usually a bad idea.  Her main points are these:

• You lose brand identity and audience engagement
• You lose the ability to leverage your audience
• You confuse people and search engines
• You may have to spend substantial additional resources
• You cobble your search acquisition efforts
• It can be difficult to match promotions to search visibility
• You don’t get the search engine value you think you get

Each one of these is elaborated upon in her blog post, so visit it for all the details, but if I were to try to sum up the case against microsites it would be this:  you’re better off concentrating all of your brand building, SEO, content and technical resources into one website because splitting it up is inefficient.

The case for microsites

Reasons to use microsites can include:

• You offer such different products or services that people would be turned off by seeing both in the same website.  For example, if you offer criminal defense and corporate law in the same firm, both could be turned off by seeing the other.
• It can help with specialized advertising.  For example, if you’re going to run a big national TV commercial campaign about mesothelioma, it might be most effective to display MesotheliomaLawyer.com vs. JoeSmithLawfirm.com and have the visitor land on a website only about mesothelioma.
• You’re doing a viral campaign, when your normal website would turn people off.  For example, it might be an uphill battle for any content on a personal injury lawyer’s website to spread virally in certain social media.
• You can take up multiple spots in search engine results instead of one.
• You can more easily rank for keywords when those keywords are in your domain (for the reasons explained below).

Microsites with keyword rich domains for SEO

One of the main draws of microsites for SEO is the ability to use a keyword rich domain .  So if you’re trying to rank for “Houston DUI lawyer,” many people believe that having HoustonDUILawyer.com as your domain will help.  Why do they think this?

Here’s an explanation — if you want to rank for a specific keyword, it’s indisputable that attracting links with anchor text containing that keyword will help.  For example, if Avvo wanted to rank for “Philadelphia DUI lawyer”, it would help to have links that look like Philadelphia DUI lawyer instead of Avvo.

The difficulty in getting keyword-rich anchor text is that many people are lazy and simply use your domain as anchor text, so instead of linking with Philadelphia DUI lawyer, they’ll just link to Avvo.com.  If our domain name were PhiladelphiaDUILawyer.com instead of Avvo.com, we wouldn’t have this problem because people using our domain as anchor text would be automatically including the the words “Philadelphia DUI lawyer” in the anchor text.

This anchor text boost is the indirect way in which a keyword-rich domain name can help with SEO.

Are keyword rich domains worth it for the anchor text SEO boost?

Vanessa doesn’t think so.  She says this:

“Keywords can indirectly help when they’re in the URL because you’ll get anchor text credit for any URL-only links. But that really has nothing to do with the domain, so why not just use keyword-rich URLs on your main domain and get those benefits without incurring all of the drawbacks of microsites?”

She’s basically saying that you don’t need to have the domain PhiladelphiaDUILawyer.com to get auto optimized anchor text — simply use those keywords in your URL, like Avvo.com/Philadelphia-DUI-lawyer, and you’ll get the same effect when people link to that page.

That’s true, but I think having keywords in your domain still helps in ways keyword-rich URLs can’t.  For example:

• The press tends to link to website homepages (if you can get them to link to you at all).
• Many directories will only link to homepages and only let you use anchor text that’s the name of your website.
• Trade associations and the like often only link to your homepage.
• People, whether they like you or hate you, often only link to you homepage.

In all of the above situations, you’re unlikely to get a link to http://www.avvo.com/dui-dwi-lawyer/pa/philadelphia.html.  Most likely you’ll just get a link to http://www.avvo.com or Avvo, so I think the indirect effect of having keywords in your domain can be substantial.  It just makes link building a lot easier, particularly for “boring” industries like law.

The big picture

Regardless of keyword rich domain issue, I agree with Vanessa that microsites are a bad idea most of the time for a variety of reasons.

From a practical standpoint, few people have the resources or inclination to maintain a slew of different websites.  From an SEO standpoint, Google is big on “authority” and brand trust to figure out which websites are best, and they seem to be going more in this direction as time goes on, so it makes sense to concentrate all of your links onto one domain.  And, ignoring SEO completely, having one websites helps with brand building, user experience and efficiently creating/managing your content.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 9:36 am by Nick and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.