When you’re looking to promote your services across different areas of Salt Lake City, you might consider creating a few different microsites to target each neighborhood or location. Although this seems like an effective way to target specific audiences and rank higher in local search results, it can hurt your website’s SEO more than it helps.
What Exactly Is a Microsite?
A microsite is a separate website that usually lives on its own domain or subdomain, away from your main website. Brands often use these sites to promote specific products or run campaigns in targeted locations.
For example, if your primary website is YourBusiness.com, you might launch YourProductSite.com or Campaign.YourBusiness.com to build a standalone brand experience. But while this seems like a good way to reach audiences in specific neighborhoods, microsites come with major SEO trade-offs that can affect your long-term search rankings.
The Risks of Microsites
Dilute Domain Authority
Search engines look at your domain as a whole. When you build up your main site with fresh content and backlinks, you build domain authority, which helps your entire site rank in search engine results.
But when you launch a microsite, you’re basically starting from a blank canvas. That new site has no pages or links pointing to it, meaning it has no authority. Any effort you put into building it up will take time that you could have spent strengthening your main site.
Compete With Your Own Pages
Let’s say your main website has a page that talks about your software solution. Now you create a microsite that promotes that same software, but with different branding and structure.
You’re now competing with yourself in search results. Google has to decide which version to show, and you risk both pages ranking lower as a result. You’re also doubling your content workload while confusing search engines about which page should take priority.
The more effective approach is to build on your existing site and create internal content hubs (groups of related pages linked together) that strengthen your domain authority.
Require Extra Resources With Less Return
Microsites might seem low-maintenance at first glance, but they require a lot of upkeep.
For example, you need to handle hosting and security updates separately from your main site. You’ll also need to create fresh content and drive traffic from scratch since the microsite has no built-in audience. All of this takes time and budget that could go toward your main site instead.
This can have a negative impact on your search engine ranking as Google tends to notice neglected sites and outrank them with fresher, more active domains.
Scatter Link Building
Backlinks are one of the most powerful ranking signals. When other sites link to your content, it builds trust with search engines. But when you spread your link-building efforts across multiple domains, you slow your momentum.
Let’s say you have 20 great backlinks, but they’re split between your main site and your microsite. That means neither domain benefits fully, and you’re wasting opportunities to grow the authority of your core brand.
Building links is already hard. Don’t make it harder by scattering your content across disconnected URLs.
There Are Better Alternatives to Microsites
If your goal is to highlight a specific campaign or product, you don’t need a whole new website to do it. Instead, you can work with an agency specializing in Salt Lake City SEO to:
- Create a dedicated landing page within your main site’s structure
- Use clear navigation and internal links to draw attention to campaign content
- Develop a pillar page with supporting blog content to build topical authority
By keeping everything under your primary domain, a professional SEO agency can help you retain your site’s authority while still targeting customers in different regions.
Exceptions to the Rule
There are a few cases where it can make sense to build a microsite. For example, when you’re a large company running completely separate brands, or when you’re targeting audiences that have nothing to do with each other, a microsite can help keep your messaging distinct. However, these situations are rare, and most businesses won’t benefit from splitting their online presence.
Unless you have a separate brand with an entirely different market and messaging strategy, a single domain will serve you better in the long run.
How to Recover From Microsite Mistakes
If you’ve already launched one or more microsites and aren’t seeing results, don’t panic. You can:
- Redirect the microsite’s content back to your main site
- Consolidate content onto a new landing page or blog series
- Use 301 redirects to preserve any backlink equity the microsite may have earned
Doing this can be challenging if you’re not an experienced developer. Fortunately, a technical SEO agency can help you get everything set up in a way that preserves your authority and rankings.
A Microsite Isn’t a Macro Solution
Microsites might seem like a shortcut to better rankings, but they can hurt your SEO if you’re spreading yourself too thin. Unless you have a truly separate brand, it’s better to invest in your main site. With a solid strategy and support from an SEO agency, you can build authority and grow your visibility over time.
Infographic
Creating multiple microsites to target different Salt Lake City neighborhoods may seem like a smart local SEO tactic, but it often weakens your overall online performance instead of improving it. Explore the hidden risks of microsites in SEO in this infographic.
