Eroding Site Equity With A Brand Strategy
For many ad agencies, building a mini site for a client is often the answer to a new campaign. It allows creative control, a chance to grab a cool domain, and to create something fresh as an extension instead of being tied to the brand identity guidelines.
What most advertising agencies and businesses don’t realize is when they build a mini site, they’re giving up some of their brand’s equity by doing so. Links are like an Internet marketing currency of the web, and the equity they build also builds the brand online. Rather than creating mini sites, which can be cool, its of more value in the long term to keep everything on your main site.
First off, even though you could redirect it later, it dilutes the strength compared to any natural links that are deep linked into your site. If you have to have that cool domain for a campaign, you could redirect it. But the best advice is to keep it all on your site for the direct links instead of resorting to redirects.
If the new addition goes a few pages deep, you might also acquire new deep links as well. When it comes to link strategies, it’s all about keeping it natural. And deep links should probably out weigh the ones pointing at the root by at least 3 to 1. There’s no reason a campaign can’t be a sub directory of a mini site, and you can even deviate away from the main design. But it’s strongly advised to have the logo clickable back to the index so visitors can explore the rest of your site deeper.
I had talked to some folks about their site recently, and after examining their other web properties and a little investigating, it seems a few agencies they worked with each had them create new sites for new projects. Now they have some nice sites, but had these all been incorporated into the main one, they’re site authority would be stronger by the sheer volume of the links combined pointing at the main one. Containing within the main site would also probably lead to more stickiness and pageviews, which in this case would help, along with stronger rankings for a variety of phrases.
That’s not to say there isn’t a place for mini sites either. Often there is a need in SEO to build out a network of these in order to improve your inbound links (IBL’s). The advantage being you control the anchor text, and so long as they maintain relevance and a few other things its all good right? Well, yes and no. A surge of low ranking sites without being interwoven into the network or social web is just a bunch of low ranking unauthoritative spam to the search engines, and possibly does little for you. And you also tasked with creating links for all the new sites as well. In the long run, if you don’t do it right, you probably made twice as much work for yourself.
The majority of the time you’ll want to keep your content, campaigns, and mini sites within the framework of your main site. It’s your brand, and you want to create the equity through content and social strategies, not campaign clusters.
