When do you take down a microsite?

Reader Question: I have a question about microsites. If you make a microsite for a certain promotion, what do you generally do with it once that promotion is over? How long do you keep that site up? For a few weeks after? Do you then direct people who type in the URL to a main web page instead? – Alexandra Habeeb

Alexandra poses a great question, here’s your answer:

Strategy 1: Build online destination and SEO

Answering the question starts by looking at the strategy for the microsite. If the strategy is to rebuild long-term equity in an independent online property and deliver search engine optimization benefits, then you’d want to keep the site live and evolve the content.

Yes, that was a strategic mouthful. Something we would typically make fun of.

So, in other words, ask yourself: Does the site have an afterlife? If it was tied so specifically to an event or date that it can’t live on, see Strategy 2 below.

If there’s hope for an afterlife, do the following.

Revise the home page with a “thank-you” message and introduce an immediate next step. Suggest what you want the visitor to do next.

For example, if you offered a July 4th-specific promotion where the visitor could download a $2-off coupon, you would say, “Thank you for your interest. The July 4th Fireworks promotion has ended. If you’d like to receive updates for future promotions sign up here.”

In addition, if your site were centered on golf, say, you would add golf tips – and this is important – specific to your offering or area. We wouldn’t recommend general golf tips, like how to improve your backswing, because too many sites have that covered. Instead, suggest best courses in your area or most helpful local golf pros. You would want to add content that would help you stand out from the crowd and be unique to your organization.

There’s a lot more advice we can give, but that’s the general answer for Strategy 1.

Strategy 2: Short-term promotion. Clear end date.

This sounds like the strategy Alexandra might be employing. The objective is to let visitors know the promotion is over, what to do next, and most importantly, why they should come back to these pages. You have an engaged audience, don’t waste the opportunity.

First, as in the strategy above, revise the home page with a “thank-you-the-promotion-is-over” message and introduce an immediate next step.

You should leave this site up as long as you’re getting a significant number of visitors. You can tell this through your site analytics. If 100+ visitors a month are still coming to the site, leave it up to avoid disrupting traffic patterns.

Second, create a new destination on your main, long-term site where you want your microsite visitors to go. We strongly recommend you don’t simply add a page. Rather, try to maintain the original look and feel of the microsite — otherwise you’ll confuse the visitors, which is why we suggest “create a destination” on and not just add a page to your main site.

You can separate the microsite from the main site by putting it in a subdomain or subfolder. This produces a nice distinction between the two sites and you don’t have to introduce new design elements or navigation options, which again, might confuse your original microsite visitor. Thus, the new microsite at the main site should be almost the same as the original, just with a slightly different URL.

And the new URL can retain words from the original URL. So if the original microsite was at www.july4golfpromotion.com, the new URL can be www.bigstore.com/july4golfpromotion or july4golfpromotion.bigstore.com.

This way you maintain creative and thematic consistency and help your SEO efforts as well by having all the content under one domain. (How to use microsites for SEO purposes is a separate and long discussion, which we’ll tackle another day.)

Third, once the traffic has died down to your microsite, use a 301 redirect to send visitors automatically to the new destination you just set up on the main site. When they land on the new pages, everything should feel the same (they won’t notice the URL change or it won’t matter).

Once the 301 redirect is in place, you can take down the original Microsite.

The question you may be thinking: Why not just do a 301 redirect right away and take down the microsite immediately? You can. And it probably won’t hurt anything. But our general philosophy is to move incrementally to avoid messing up a good thing — it’s the law of unintended consequences.

Another good question: Why not just build the microsite in a subdomain or subfolder in the first place? That’s a great question as well. Look for our answer in the next issue of Website Magazine.

Thanks again, Alexandra, for your question. We did shorthand a lot of technology solutions, like subdomains and 301 redirects, which we’re assuming your IT folks can handle. If not, go here: www.microsite.com