Jan 10
29
What Size Website Should Your New Business Build?
You are a new online business owner, and the last thing that you need is one more decision to make. Unfortunately, I have one more thing for you to consider: 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. Obviously, if we automatically knew which was the preferred size, there wouldn’t be a choice to make.
I should stress that this topic is not related to how large you want the business to ultimately become. Companies that follow either model can ultimately 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 websites should be concentrated on a narrow sub-niche built around a cohesive, limited set of relatively long-tail keywords. Sites that are designed to become quite large eventually will develop most of their content in the same focused way, but they will also begin search engine optimization on the shorter, very high competition keywords at the same time.
The growth models of the two are very different after each has satisfactorily mastered the beginning, narrow sub-niche. 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. Conversely, the silo sites will take longer to mature, but they can eventually become competitive for the top level keywords as they simultaneously enter the fray for the more tightly targeted words and phrases. Eventually, the silo site might become recognized as an authority in the broader niche.
Let me move now to some of the important practical matters that are impacted by your decision on this important matter.
One of these pertains to the amount that needs to be invested into the site itself in the beginning. Although you’re still beginning relatively small with the site that you plan to become large, the foundation for a larger site must be laid. That means that the site’s eventual architecture must be created and the systems put in place that will eventuall become necessary for operation. 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.
The ways in which you think about your keywords is another important difference. Any 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 (keywords that are sometimes said to have “commercial intent”) With the large site plan, you will conduct your research with two focal points: the lower competition but more targeted long-tails and the highest level, most competitive short tails (which are less likely to convert immediately, but the users of which might be nurtured into eventually becoming customers.
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. Thus, it is more difficult to achieve a high page rank than it is for a large site because of its inherent value on that variable.
So I hope I have given you some food for thought, even though I haven’t provided a clear cut answer to you. Perhaps, though, these considerations provide you with an inclination as to which approach you should take given your own unique business circumstances.
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