Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

Site organization can help your website and your business

Like installing WordPress, adding a subdomain from cpanel is quite easy. You will look for the section that deals with domains. Locate an icon that says subdomains. Clicking on it brings you to a simple form where you type in the name of the subdomain. Click on the create box, and you are done. This gives you a new section for your website that has a url structure subdomain.yoursite.com. If we had added a folder to your current site, the structure would be yoursite.com/newfolder/.

Once the subdomain has been created, you will have to install WordPress there to have a website in that location. The setup that exists on your main site does not carry over to the subdomain, so act like it is a whole new site.

Installing it was the easy part, but what do you do with it. Why would you want a subdomain?

For a small business, I can think of two basic reasons why you would want a subdomain: emphasizing a brand name while giving a division of your firm more prominence; or targeting a specific term or area in your marketing. Subdomains will take some work to setup, but they help you target a specific part of your audience.

Emphasizing Brand

Let us study an example. Imagine a firm called AtHome. This company is building its brand in one community. It wants consumers to associate AtHome with everything you need in your home; however, this is quite a few different types of products. The owner of AtHome decided to open several stores where each location specializes in one area of products. He has a store that deals with items for children, another for garden and landscape needs, furniture, and finally kitchen.

Each store has its own name, but the owner has focused his branding on the AtHome name to encourage customers of one store to go to the other stores. When setting up a website, the owner wants to continue the emphasis of the AtHome name while having each site create a unique experience for the customer. The store specializing in the kitchen sells equipment and food items, so having recipes on the site may be in the cards. You will want cooking images throughout the site. This works for the kitchen, but it is a detriment to the kids store site.

The owner is able to maintain an emphasis on the main brand (AtHome), but each store will have its own emphasis. Remember the subdomain will give the individual store name first then the AtHome name, so you could have KidsatPlay.AtHome.com. A customer looking for the AtHome brand will find the site through that name, and a customer looking for the KidsatPlay store will find it.

Targeting a term

In a second example, we look at an owner who needs to improve his marketing, and his website is one tool in his campaign that can help him accomplish this task. In this scenario, we can break his dilemma into two situations.

Situation One

His business name does not include a word that a searcher would type into Google (or any search engine) to find a firm that deals with your business. Taking the AtHome name again, we could assume that it only sells kitchen equipment. If I wanted to find stores that sell kitchen equipment in my neighborhood, I might type “kitchen equipment stores”. A competitor has a website called “kitchenequipmentstore.com”, and that site is turning up first in the results. Having a keyword or keyphrase in your site name can help the search engines associate your business with what it sells. Recognizing this issue, the business creates a subdomain with that keyphrase, so we have the site “kitchenequipmentstore.AtHome.com”. This site name helps us reach out intended customer.

Situation Two

Many small businesses work in specific areas, but sometimes even a small area can have many different names. Take Houston as an example. There is a greater Houston area, but you also have the cities of Bellaire, West University, Bunker Hill, and the list could go on. You also have identifiable neighborhoods that you may want to target, like The Village, The Heights, Meyerland, and again the list could go on. Now AtHome is a landscaping service that wants you to feel at home in your garden. A homeowner looking for a landscaper might type in their city name or neighborhood name to focus on a landscaper for that neighborhood. The owner discovers that the phrase “landscaper in Bellaire” is the most popular way to search for landscapers in that area.

The owner then creates a site with subdomains focusing on keyphrases for each area. The owner now has “landscaperinbellaire.AtHome.com”, “landscaperinmeyerland.AtHome.com”, and so on. Each site has the same basic pages, but there are changes to make each subdomain unique to that area. This is called geotargeting. You can achieve geotargeting without a subdomain. It takes planning, but not really difficult. By using the subdomain format, you have the opportunity to improve the possibility of reaching the clients that you want.

The last paragraph hits upon a fact that you will need to consider for your business. Will a subdomain benefit you more than targeting your marketing on your main site? Creating a subdomain is creating a new website, which means that you will need to do the work to make it feasible just like you did with the main site. Is targeting a specific word or phrase worth it? It may be, but you should research it before creating as many subdomains as possible.

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