The Microsite Mistake – Mistaking Microsites for Mistakes

I have a lot of respect for Rand Fishkin as a marketer. He is also a polite guy, usually quite open-minded about things, and he works hard to help the SEO and Web Marketing communities forward. But today’s WhiteBoard Friday was just absolutely awful (and I said as much in a comment on SEOmoz which I am sure will earn me a few more Thumbs Down).

Rand’s Whiteboard Friday video today was titled “The Microsite Mistake”, and he launched into a diatribe against the corporate use of microsites. Of course, Rand is a link-based marketer — and let me say up front that link-based marketing is not exactly the same thing as link-based search engine optimization.

Now, Rand has advocated link-based search engine optimization for years and I’ve openly criticized link-based SEO for being inefficient, relatively ineffectual, and highly overglamorized. It’s guys like Rand Fishkin who make it look so easy. He is creative, articulate, thoughtful, and he puts together a damn fine Web site that is going to earn links regardless of whether I approve of anything he says.

There are quite a few so-called “A List” SEO bloggers who eat Rand’s dust on an average morning when it comes to readership. And if you’ve ever sat through a sales and marketing motivational rah rah session where all the top performers are trucked out on stage to make everyone else feel like they are not working hard enough, you have probably suffered through at least one of those “If you want to make more money, just do whatever the guy with the most money does” speeches.

That philosophy only works for the guy with the most money. In any sales and marketing organization there can only be one top performer. Top performers typically have good connections (in many cases I’ve found that rookie top-performers brought great connections with them) and a mentor who steers them through the obstacles that everyone else has to navigate on their own.

The same principle holds true for search engine optimization, blogging, Web marketing, etc. Just because Rand Fishkin can build a lot of buzz doesn’t mean everyone can. Some people are better at driving race cars and some people at good enough to drive delivery trucks (which are two different skill sets). Race car drivers get all the glamor. You don’t see people lining up down the block, waiting to ask a veteran 18-wheel driver for his autograph because he’s gone 30 years without an accident. You’ll see people line up to get a rookie race car driver’s autograph if he walks away from a bad pileup.

So when someone like Rand Fishkin tells people, “It’s a mistake to create microsites — you’ll spread your link and domain diversity to the wrong sites”, that’s a serious message that gets a lot of distribution. It also happens to be a very bad message, a message based on the least efficient method of search engine optimization: link-based SEO.

How many links does it take to get a single Web page to rank for 100 expressions? A lot more links than most people will get in year, maybe even a lifetime. But that same Web page can rank for 100 expressions almost entirely on its own simply because of where it is hosted, what is on it, and how much emphasis and repetition goes into crafting the content. If you want 100 targeted visitors to your Web site, you’ll get them faster by writing lots of well-organized, optimized copy than by building links.

On a blog, your lag time for being indexed can be as little as a few seconds.

In a link building campaign, it WILL take days, weeks, and months to get all your links into place and passing value (and you still have to deal with the fact that most links DON’T PASS VALUE).

The microsite mistake that Rand talks about is a highly effective marketing methodology that has proven itself time and again for many hundreds of companies in the Fortune 1000 list. They don’t all use microsites but many of them do and they build huge brand value in those sites.

The real microsite mistake occurs when people take their microsites down and redirect them to some other site — passing all the so-called “link juice” to the mother site. Destroying search visibility is never a good strategy when it comes to search engine optimization.

For every link you can acquire through love, loyalty, or marketing you should be able to create 1,000 words of copy and those 1,000 words of copy will create more search visibility for you and bring you more traffic than that one link.

It takes less time and effort to write 1,000 words of copy than it does to obtain a value-passing link.

You have to ask: Why would people in the SEO community keep choosing a less efficient model for their search engine optimization? The answer is that when they read SEO blogs, and go to SEO conferences, and take SEO classes, they are inundated with reams of bad advice.

Rand has published a LOT of good tips on SEOmoz. His head-smacking tips are almost always great ideas (and they are not necessarily new or innovative ideas but Rand is in a better position to advocate these ideas than most other people). He has written some pretty cool in-depth articles discussing how he launched Web sites, and so forth.

But this whole Microsite Mistake thing is itself a mistake — not a mistake in marketing for SEOmoz and Rand, but a mistake in that it’s completely wrong. It’s terrible, bad advice.

Rand and other people might come back and say, “Yeah, well, we’ve helped clients who had microsites improve their search strategies by getting rid of the microsites”.

To which I must point out: If you have a client implementing ineffective SEO, than ANY effective SEO you implement for them will work better regardless of whether you get rid of the microsites. You have to understand that complex networks operate in the search environment differently from even large, complex Web sites. Rand just doesn’t seem to get that.

Given complete freedom of control, and sufficient resources, you can reoptimize any corporate search strategy to perform better without touching the microsites. The microsite brand strategy is in no way a mistake. The execution of the microsite brand strategy may be a mistake but it is a serious mistake to conclude that microsites hurt main corporate sites.

When you have a client whose microsite strategy doesn’t seem to be working, the right thing to do is to fix the microsite strategy, not do away with the microsites. People who arbitrarily decide that microsites are a mistake do not know enough about search engine optimization to be handling microsite-based campaigns.

There pretty solid principles behind microsite-based search engine optimization. It works, it works well, and it pays huge ROI when it is done right. Many marketing companies have understood this for years and they’ve been investing resources in successful microsite branding campaigns.

There is no mistake in creating microsites when you do it for the right reasons. But when you feel someone has made a so-called “microsite mistake”, think long and hard before you decide they can improve their search engine optimization by doing away with the microsites.

You can freeze the microsites where they are and just launch a new search engine optimization strategy for the main site.

When SEOs put too much emphasis on links and focus only on link-based search engine optimization, they ignore 80-90% of what they can and should be doing in their search engine optimization. Guys like Rand Fishkin have enough cache that they can walk into a concept and get the ball rolling. Most SEOs don’t have that name-value working for them.

Do you NEED links for search engine optimization? Yes. Absolutely. You just don’t need as many as you have been misled to believe you do. If you want to invest your resources in reaching out to social media markets (and Rand does work the social media circuit), it does require a very different strategy from search engine optimization. Social media marketing is more heavily dependent upon links than search engine optimization.

The real mistake people make is to confuse search engine optimization with social media marketing. Microsites are an extremely valuable, highly effective marketing tool and they should never be viewed as a mistake simply because someone produced a video called “The Microsite Mistake”.

Microsites not only work, they can amplify your SEO efforts beyond the power of any link-based strategy. But to achieve that kind of success you have to understand how to leverage microsites for search marketing (which may only be a minor or secondary priority in the overall marketing strategy).

When you are confronted with microsites, look at them as opportunities for expanding search visibility, because that is what they are. It’s a mistake to write off microsites.