There are situations where a micro-site is a good idea, such as when a site is created to support a brand that is an extension of a parent company or when a company is running a special event or promotion. In all of these cases, there has to be enough good quality content to justify setting up a micro-site.
Because micro-sites are able to target a more specific audience and rank for long tail keywords, some website owners think that they are great for SEO – create a micro-site, get some traffic, link back to the main site, and increase your conversions – simple, right? Well, no, not quite. A micro-site should only be created if, and only if, it serves a unique purpose. It should not be created just to build links. That’s a spammy, black hat SEO tactic and Google is penalising these low quality sites.
There are many reasons that could persuade you NOT to create a micro-site for SEO. First, it is a harder task to actually populate multiple sites with good quality compelling page content. It takes time and quite a bit of effort to optimise and build links for one site, let alone build quality links for four or five sites.
Micro-sites can also mean that your content is spread out too thinly. The search engines will always give priority in their ranking to those sites which have plenty of good quality relevant content. If your content is spread out across four or five micro-sites they are all less valuable individually than if the content had been consolidated into one site. The search engines also put a lot of emphasis on trust, meaning that the age of the domain is an important part of their ranking algorithm. Since your main site is more likely to be the longest established, the content on it will be indexed more quickly by the search engines than content on a brand new micro-site.
While micro-sites can and do serve legitimate purposes, it’s not recommended to use them solely for SEO. For SEO, focus on getting your main site ranked higher in the search engines by doing a better job at producing quality, well optimised content and building good quality relevant back-links. It is always much better to ensure that you have one good site rather than a bunch of only OK sites.
If your new micro-site will have enough good quality content and maybe a blog to help add regular good quality content to it ongoing then it is perhaps appropriate to create it. If it is just a method to try and get to the top of the search engines for a particular keyword or phrase, then there are better ways to achieve this.
If you would like more information about our SEO services please leave a comment below or call 01293 822755