How to Get a Mini-Site Off to a Winning Beginning
I have written before about trying to determine the ideal size of a business website. I eventually came down to the insightful answer, “It depends.”
In this piece, I want to concentrate upon the best approach if you have decided that building a mini-website is best for you, at least in the beginning. We must look at the most important steps in planning before designing the first element on the first page of your website.
Before you even buy your domain name, you need to completely research the details of the niche you have selected and its keywords and key phrases. To be successful with a mini-site, you must be willing to focus on a few relatively low traffic keywords, especially long-tail key phrases. You also need to make sure that the small list you select for a given site are quite similar semantically.
Let me unpack that last paragraph a bit by defining the most important terms. Much of niche research is simply a combination of analyzing the competition and conducting thorough keyword research. Keyword research is discovering what words and phrases your prospective customers are likely to use when they are searching for information, products or services similar to what your business offers. Keywords are said to have long tails when the phrase entered into a search engine has multiple words. For example, “television” could be a keyword for your niche–a high level, highly competitive keyword, at that. “Panasonic HD television” is a longer tail keyword. “Buy Panasonic high definition 46 inch television in Omaha” is a very long tailed keyword. The last example phrase has the benefit of signaling commercial intent.
Competition research can be broken into two parts. One way to study your competition is to visit the sites who rank in the top twenty on Google when you conduct a search using each of the keywords for which you are thinking of competing. You want to learn what keywords they are using, how many external links are directed toward that landing page and, while you’re there, a bit about their marketing strategy. The second meaning of competition research is to get some sort of measure of how much total competition there is for each of your chosen keywords. While Google provides a free keyword tool that indicates this in graphic form, I recommend also doing a simple count of the number of sponsored listings for each of your key phrases. Google, for example, places eight to ten advertisers on the first page of search results; if there are eight or more advertisements appearing in the search results, then you have chosen a competitive keyword. Ironically, in this instance, high competition is a good thing. When lots of other businesses are willing to spend the necessary sums to attract visitors to their site who have search using that term, chances are good that at least some of those businesses are making money on those terms.
Finally, I mentioned that the long-tail key phrases that you select for your single mini-site should be closely related semantically. If we look at the last of my sample keywords from the paragragh a bit up the page, we could simply substitute other cities and those different key phrases would still be substantially the same. Alternatively, we might want to keep everything except the “46 inch” part, and substitute “42 inch” and “54 inch” and “36 inch” and so forth. Or we might want to substitute other words that signal commercial intent, such as “purchase,” “deliver,” “delivery,” “best price for,” and others.
This homework is vitally important. Many businesses who recognize its significance elect to not not invest in the necessary software and hire professional keyword researchers. Some businesses hire others to do the competition research as part of a complet niche research package. Obviously that decision is yours to make. Your business does belong to you!