Why you should steer clear of PPC "mini-me" sites
by Heather Lloyd-Martin
Does your site have a special URL just for your PPC click-thrus? If so, you're not alone. Many marketing departments and site owners love the "mini-site" campaign, where PPC traffic is redirected to a direct response site with a different URL. These "mini-sites" are often small, three-to-five page sites - if that (sometimes they are just a landing and order page) created solely for conversions. They are typically not optimized, although many site owners crave top listings for their "mini-sites" as well as their main site.
Marketers love "mini-sites" sites because you can easily A/B test your text and track your conversions without fear. And if a landing page isn't converting? Poof - you can pull it out of the "mini-site" without hurting your main site's rankings.
Why small "mini-me" sites get huge marketing play
"Mini-me" sites are also considered a "hedge" against Google's slower crawl cycle. Metrics-happy marketers grumble about a frustrating Googlefact - a slower (28-day) crawl cycle means testing A/B copy is almost impossible. You can't just try one home page one month, measure conversions, and swap out another home page a couple months later without some major ranking fluctuations.
Although you can sometimes maintain listings after a copy switch, it's not guaranteed without implementing a concentrated strategy. Swapping text (like rewriting your home page) takes an incredible amount of time, energy and positive thinking - and most site owners don't want to take chances with their Google campaign. Unfortunately, this puts people into a negative Googlespin. Your conversions could improve. . .but you're afraid to change anything in case your rankings drop. . .which means that you know that there's room for improvement...
Why "mini-me" sites will hurt your SEO branding efforts
Although "mini-me" sites seem like a natural strategy to implement - especially if you're running separate campaigns for different products or services - it can actually hurt your company three ways:
- Your company suddenly has a domain management issue, where your online brand is spread across multiple sites. This serves to make each site "compete" with each other for rankings and splits your SEO efforts. Plus, if Google (or another search engine) detects multiple company URL's, your rankings could drop.
(Yes, even SEO experts [like us <g>] struggle over domain management issues. See Detlev's Techie Talk article for a technical explanation on how domain management problems can douse your rankings.) A future article written by Heather detailing the Wine.com case study will be released in Search Day soon. - You are spending time and resources creating two conversion-based landing pages: One page as a PPC landing page and the other written for spidering search engine positions. This doubles your efforts without adding additional value.
- You are also splitting your online branding efforts, promoting multiple URLs rather than your main one.
Granted, there are some industries (think pharmaceutical companies) that are forced to deal with "mini-me" campaigns - just by nature of their business. Pharmaceutical companies and some big-brand sites have one URL for branding/industry positioning purposes, splitting off other domains for consumer purposes. For example, Pfizer has a corporate site, as well as a separate site for Viagra (and their other drugs). The trick is doing it right and not doing something that will trip up a search engine spider and make them think, "spam."
Is this right for you? In most cases, no. For about 90 percent of companies, including all content on the main site is your best option. If you're creating "mini-me" sites only because the ad-buying department controls PPC campaigns, and you're not integrating them into your holistic SEO campaign, you are totally missing the boat.
Your "mini-me" site alternative (and you'll see great positions, too!)
Your best bet? Create keyphrase-rich landing pages for your PPC campaign - and keep these pages on your main site. That way, people clicking through from your PPC ad can then surf around your entire site - and you won't lose them with any redirects from the "mini-me" site.
If you must take the "mini-me" site approach for marketing purposes, choose *one* main site to promote within the search engines, and robots.txt out the other "mini-me" sites. That way, your main site gains positioning, and you free yourself from any sticky domain management issues.
If you're worried about conversions, you can use your PPC campaign to actually test your landing page conversion rates. Here's how: