Use a Microsite to build your business.

How many different services and products do you offer through your website? How many different market segments are you targeting? Sometimes, visitors to your website might be overwhelmed by how many products or services you offer. One method for reaching out to these potential customers is to create landing pages - pages within your site that talk to those targets specifically - but another method that might be even more effective is to create Microsites.

What is a Microsite?

A Microsite, or minisite, is a website that businesses can use to offer information about a specific service, product or product group. Microsites differ from landing pages or squeeze pages in that the microsite is intended to provide a lot more information. Microsites will commonly include a blog and multimedia, and certainly multiple pages of content. Landing pages and squeeze pages are typically just a single, long page.

The way to use a microsite for a business is to set it up with a lot of great content on your service or product, and then regularly add additional content to it, just like you would your normal website. However, because this entire site is devoted to a specific target market, your keyword frequency will be much higher (if you aren't sure what that means, please check out How To Target Keywords).

You can see an example of a microsite that we started this week to illustrate what companies can do at St Louis Web Designs - http://www.stlouiswebdesigns.us. This site is clearly designed to target our St. Louis geographic area. We will be adding additional sites that target small businesses, CMS programming, social networking, and other targeted markets. The new site includes several pages already and an integrated blog. It also has a number of links directly back to our main website as well as social media integration.

How do you build a Microsite?

One of the beauties of a microsite is that, if you've received a custom Drupal implementation from Stadia Studio, you can have additional microsites created for you at a fraction of the cost of the original website. As you can see from the example, we used the same overall design as our main website which, for a Drupal CMS, means all we had to do was upload the custom theme and activate it. Page and Blog creation come "out of the box" with Drupal, and we always include features like social media integration and XML sitemaps so that, once you start posting new content, your site will get found by Google and other search engines.

The key to building a great microsite is to choose just a few targeted keyword phrases and then build the entire site's content around those phrases. In this case, our sole target phrase was "St Louis Web Design Company." We bought a domain name as close to the target keyword as possible, and set up a separate hosting account and CMS installation.

Note: a Microsite should have its own domain name and hosting account. The domain name should be as closely related to your targeted keyword as possible. While a .com domain might be preferable, other domain extensions are certainly OK, particularly if you're targeting search engine traffic. If you were planning to use the microsite for an event or product where significant traditional marketing might be used, like television or print ads, a .com domain is essential. For more information on domain names, please see Domain Names 101.

What does a Microsite talk about?

Of course, businesses should provide information about the product or service they're offering. They should also provide more factual information. In our case, we may add information about St. Louis and businesses in and around St. Louis. We will post helpful information for our clients, like, what the sales tax rate is for Missouri businesses who want to sell online. We might also offer links and information for clients looking to start a business website and need to incorporate in Missouri. We will blog on current events and news that might be of interest or affect St. Louis area businesses specifically. Every time that we do, we will look for ways to utilize our targeted keywords in meaningful ways.

Will this help with search engines?

With a new keyword-rich, search engine optimized microsite website, your business can potentially attract higher levels of traffic. Additionally, as your main site and your microsites grow, you will create links between them which Google and other search engines will count as "backlinks" thereby improving each others search engine ranking. Cross-linking will also help search engines find both sites faster if not previously indexed.

Are there any other benefits?

If your business uses marketing methods like direct mail, you can send potential customers to your new microsite instead of your main site and better gauge the success of each campaign.

Microsites can be used to announce the launch of new products, giving your new product or service an identity of its own.

While we have suggested using the same overall site design and style for ease and cost-efficiency, a separate site also gives you the option of creating a brand and image specifically for a product.

And, probably the greatest benefit of all, is the fact that most web visitors only look at the home page of your site and then leave. A microsite, geared specifically to these visitors and their needs, will have a greater retention rate than your main website.

Ultimately, whether or not a microsite makes sense for a business will depend on your business. Do you have a lot of services or products? Or, do you cover multiple geographic regions or vertical markets? If it would be helpful to present each of those target customers with a custom message and information, than a microsite may be just the marketing solution that you need.