Large Website or Small Website for Your Company’s New Business?
You are the owner of a new online business, and the last thing that you need is one more decision to make. Unfortunately, I have one more thing for you to ponder: What should be the size of your first website?
There exist two schools of thought on this quandry and both have data to support them. Of course, if we automatically knew which was the preferred way to proceed, there wouldn’t be a decision that would have to be made at all.
I must emphasize that this issue is not related to how large you want the business to eventually become. Companies that follow either approach can both eventually become quite large and successful. It also is not necessarily impacted your target niche. The planned size of a website in the beginning can lead to ultimate growth and financial success of the business as a whole.
I should alert you that reading this article will not automatically give you the right answer to this particular question of size. Instead, what I hope to provide is a set of some things for you to consider so that whether you build a small website immediately or lay the groundwork for a mega-site, you’ll understand that decision’s impact upon key variables now and in the future.
Small, mini-sites are focussed upon one narrow sub-niche. Generally, they concentrate upon dominating a relatively small number of keyword, often long-tailed phrases. Often the business model of such sites calls for the generation of traffic through means other than organic search engine optimization, although this is not always the case. Indeed, sometimes a mini-site becomes remarkably well optimized for those particular targeted keywords.
On the other hand, sites that begin with the ultimate design of growing very large are often focused simultaneously upon beginning with highly targeted long-tail keywords and also beginning to build a reputation for those shorter, high traffic search terms (the “parent” keywords, if you will). While the traffic model may begin with approaches other than organic search, the business will consciously focus from the beginning upon eventually relying increasingly upon traffic from organic search results.
The two approaches call for different models of long term growth, although both may begin largely concentrating upon a relatively narrow slice of the market. Those who have taken the mini-site approach, will begin to duplicate their success by building a new, small site in another sub-niche with a new set of long-tailed keywords. Large site businesses will instead build another section onto their growing original site. This new section, over time, is joined by others (think of new departments being added to a sporting goods store, for example). Each new section takes on a new sub-niche. So, as the big sites grow ever larger with more and more categories, departments or silos, the business with mini-sites might create twenty or fifty or a hundred individual “storefronts.”
Positive cash flow can be established sooner with the small site approach. Part of this is due to the larger site having to invest resources in chasing the higher level keywords, which the mini-site is likely to ignore. In the long run however, over the course of many months or even years, the mega-sites can become competitive for the high traffic keywords and might even become recognized as an authority in the broadly based market.
I’ll point to three practical ramifications of how you decide to approach this business decision.
The first has to do with start up cost. When you plan to build a large site, the architecture of the whole site (as it will eventually become) must be in place. Consequently, although the mini-site and the eventual mega-site may be the same size at launch, the model for the larger site costs more at start-up. Mini-sites are much less expensive to build than it is to build the foundation for a larger business site.
A second practical difference pertains to your approach to keywords. Your keyword research for a small site will be undertaken to locate a limited number of closely related long term keywords. Special attention will be given to those keywords that are likely to convert immediately If you opt for the silo site, you will be splitting the focus of your keyword research. In one way, you will be imitating the search of your small site competitors by looking for those longer tails that are higher converting, but you must also identify all of the high traffic keywords so that you can begin to attract visitors who are gathering information rather than ready to make a decision to buy or sign a contract.
The last practical ramification has to do with page rank. The number of pages in a site is one of the variables that is part of the page rank algorithm, assuming the internal linking structure of the site is well optimized. Consequently, it is easier for a large site to achieve a high page rank than for a small site, although you must remember that other variables are even more important in maximizing the total page rank.
I trust that I have given you some things to think about and apply to your unique business situation, even though I have not provided any clear cut decision with respect to which alternative is best for you.