A unified site may be better than a micro-site

Have you created a micro-site for a specific brand's campaign? How about more than one micro-site? If so you may be doing more harm than good because the content and keywords for different campaigns may be competing against themselves.

by Kristina Knight

According to a recent study by Marketing Sherpa, micro-sites serve a purpose and can be a huge benefit to marketers but a unified site may be better because it delivers a single message. With each micro-site that is created, the brand's message can be diluted.

Why? Because if the content isn't different and if the keywords delivering traffic to the site aren't unique, the paid and organic search results pointing to your websites will be harder to slog through for consumers.

In these cases, a unified site is a better option. But, how do you determine what to include?

First, consider the URL. Look at the traffic to each micro-site, look at the keyword performance rates and consider expanding the most-visited URL with the best-performing keywords. Because search engines favor websites with longer histories or with higher traffic numbers, choosing the micro-site that performs the best makes perfect sense.

Second, index the pages you'll need from each site and build a master site map. Benchmark the existing micro-sites and figure out which pages are most visited. By adding these highly trafficked pages to a new unified site, you'll draw in more visitors.

Finally, make sure the content on the new unified site isn't redundant. If the same ad copy has been used between different campaigns, there may not be enough of a difference for the search engines to find. By rewriting the copy to be unique, you'll solve that problem before it begins.