The pros and cons of microsites

Now more than ever companies are using microsites for highly focused product promotions, guerrilla marketing tactics and demographic-specific campaigns. These mini websites work differently than parent sites and can reach audiences in new ways.

Pros and Cons

In most cases brands employ one main company website, but others use a series of smaller, focused websites to augment a corporate website. The pros and cons depend on the goals and objectives of the microsites.

One of the main problems with using one main company website is the need to build pages featuring several products and services. This makes it easy for visitors to get sidetracked, confused and struggle to find what they were looking for. There are also search engine optimization problems that arise when trying to optimize one website for such a diverse array of keyword phrases.

The single biggest contributor to reach top search engine ranking is keyword rich, inbound links. These links are difficult to cultivate when pages must address several different topics at once. PPC campaigns can provide a solution to this problem, but it’s potentially a very expensive option.

We recommends using microsites to complement a main website and drive larger marketing campaigns to these smaller microsites. One benefit of using microsites is that they are small, highly focused websites tied to unique domain URL to promote a service, incentive offer or product. They can be a great way to increase exposure for your business as a part of a comprehensive internet marketing strategy. Because they are highly targeted, visitors are presented with a small number of pages that relate to the product or service that they are interested in. This makes it much more likely that your visitors will convert into sales or inquiries.

Having dedicated microsites for each product or service offers the potential to double a brand’s internet exposure via search engines. The chance to get different pages ranking for an array of keywords is extremely beneficial for digital marketers. Optimizing a microsite for search engines can be much easier and more effective because marketers don’t have to worry about building links to inner pages of your website, which can be very difficult. Efforts can stay focused on optimizing homepages for targeted keywords and phrases that relate to specific products or services. This also means marketers can take full advantage of multimedia technologies like Flash without detracting from search engine rankings. It is important to note that sometimes microsites may not make sense from an SEO perspective when content is best served under an existing domain.

Microsites can be particularly useful to work alongside a specific advertising campaign. They are also used most often with Social Marketing Campaigns. This affords a strong promotional branding opportunity without impacting a main site’s look and feel. As a separate entity, microsites offer the chance for variation in visual style and branding for that specific product, service or event.

Microsites can be a great addition to your internet marketing strategy. The advantages can far outweigh the relatively small amount of work and cost required to develop microsites. The flexibility they offer outside of the constraints of a corporate website and the sizeable SEO advantages mean they are worth considering as part of an internet marketing strategy.