Begin a Mini-Site Before You Begin a Mini-Site…Say What?

Previously I have looked at the all the variables that go into deciding the ideal size of a business website.  Should it be a large, authority site or a highly targeted smaller website (a mini-site)?

In this article, I want to concentrate upon the best approach if you have determined that building a mini-web site is most appropriate for your online presence.  I especially want to concentrate on your preparation, before you start designing that first page.

Before you even buy your domain name, you need to thoroughly research the details of the niche you have chosen and its keywords and key phrases.  To be successful with a mini-site, you must 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.

Providing my definition of some of the most important terms in that last paragraph will help me clarify.  Niche research involves doing keyword research and competition 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.  “Long-tail keyword” is merely the term that is applied to a search term that has more than just a few words.  I’ll use this as my example:  “Television” might be a keyword for your niche.  “Panasonic HD television” is a longer tail keyword.  “Buy Panasonic high definition 46 inch television in Omaha” is a longer tailed search term (or keyword).  The last example phrase has the benefit of signaling commercial intent. 

There are two, distinct elements in competition research.  On the one hand you will gather information about what your top competitors are doing by visiting those sites in the top twenty results of a seach for each of the words and phrases you have selected for your website.  You will spy on your competition to find out which other keywords they use, the number of external links that are directed toward the page that the search engine listed and take note of their copy, their design and 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.  You probably wouldn’t make any money promoting a keyword that nobody else is interested in.

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.

It is not possible to emphasize too much the essential nature of this preliminary research.  Some enterprises choose to hire out keyword research to experts who possess both the experience and the necessary software.  Some businesses hire others to do the competition research as part of a complet niche research package.  Clearly that decision is yours to make.  After all, it is your business, you know!