Should you be interested in Microsites?
What are some microsite examples?
Bank Human, Again — Marketing Campaign
This marketing campaign was set up by TD Bank in America — bankhumanagain.com. One of the main benefits of having microsites is that they allow you to have a lot more control over the look and feel of a website, and this example provides a good illustration of that. Their main site featured on the left-hand side of the image below, is much like any banking website you come across — clean and functional so as to best act as a reference point for their products and for customers to log in to online banking. If they were to bolt this marketing campaign onto a separate page on the existing site it would simply look out of place and could cause confusion for the end user.
In this case there isn’t a specific focus on keyword optimisation for search engines because it is a marketing campaign. They would drive traffic to that site through online channels such as PPC and social media advertising, in the hope that people are engaged by that message and then decide to bank with them. For offline marketing efforts having a microsite with a unique and memorable domain name e.g. bankhumanagain.com is better than directing people to an extension of a main site e.g. tdbank.com/bankhumanagain.
Best Summer Schools — Company Division
Earlier last month we launched bestsummerschools.co.uk. At first glance it doesn’t seem to fit into the micro part of ‘microsite’ — but that is the key point to reiterate — it is just a marketing term to differentiate the aspects and efforts of a business. In this case Education Advisors Ltd is the business who own a number of sites related to giving advice on independent schools and colleges, with ‘Best Summer Schools’ being one in their arsenal.
This provides a good illustration of using microsites to help your business rank for a broader range of keywords. If you type into Google you will notice that when you enter the search term ‘best schools’, the first result is best-schools.co.uk which is also owned by Education Advisors. For another search term ‘best summer schools’, the new site features somewhere on the 4th page.
Now this is perfectly normal for a site starting out, especially for such a competitive keyword. They are certainly on the right track to move up the rankings, with their on-page SEO being on point as you can see in the annotation below (apologies for the unsteady hand).
It generally takes time and concerted effort to improve search engine rankings. Therefore it makes sense that if a project is short-term in nature and you want to attract people through search engines, then you would be better off adding pages to an existing site to benefit from its domain authority.
Best Summer Schools is a long-term project so it is right to set up as a microsite. As Google picks up on indicators that the site is a quality resource, their ranking for ‘best summer schools’ will potentially rise to the same heights as best-schools.co.uk has done.
Creating a microsite vs Adding pages to an existing website
There isn’t a 'one size fits all' solution for deciding whether to create a dedicated microsite or to just add another page to your main site, though there are some basic considerations that come into play, falling into two groups.
User Experience
Thinking in terms of user experience, which we have already have touted as becoming increasingly important in the future, adding more pages to an existing design can quickly make the site become unwieldy and hard to navigate.
SEO
People often point to SEO as a reason against creating a separate microsite. This is because it takes a long time and effort to build up domain authority - which is one of the best predictor of how a website ranks for search terms. If it is important to get ranked in Google in a timely manner then adding pages or sections to your existing site would be a better option, though be wary about falling short on the User Experience as mentioned above. It is worth noting that this isn’t the clear cut choice, as a long-term objective to rank for a different set of keywords can be achieved through a microsite— as the Best Summer Schools example nicely demonstrates.
With that all said...
For the majority of businesses a microsite strategy wont be on the cards unless your main website is doing all it can to help achieve your business goals. Hopefully you can take something away from this post by drawing any parallels from the examples above with your own business.
