All – been lurking for a long time. I posted this question on a couple of other sites, so we'll see. I now work with a company that has a fairly large challenge – we have a few thousand small business clients that we need to move to the internet and handle their SEM, mostly with localized PPC. Most of the small biz’s are doing some print advertising and have a small, low quality website while some do not. Very few are running PPC campaigns or doing any SEM at all. Our challenge is: how to we roll out a ppc product and manage thousands of campaigns all related to local search in different categories (dentists, roofers, plumbers, etc)? How do we scale the model? Here’s the immediate question that I could use your all’s expert advice with… What is the best way to structure the landing pages?? 1) Use one domain and create sub-domains for each client for landing pages. For example, we would have www.smallbusiness.com as the main site, and the client landing pages would be something like www.dentist.smallbusiness.com or www.landscaper2.smallbusiness.com etc. i) Pros: operationally better, more manageable ii) Cons: Will it hurt our Quality score? Does google look at the content of the entire domain or just the “landing page†with quality score. 2) Create landing pages for the main domain. For example, www.smallbusiness.com/dentist. Same as above. Will Google view this as better or worse than option #1? How will this affect quality score? 3) Take control of the clients domain and just create landing pages from it. This is the best option, but not scalable since it will be hard to get the small bz’ server info, etc. This one would be difficult. Thoughts??? I know it’s a lot of questions. The main one is this: Is the subdomain landing page idea (#1) feasible for 1,000 to 3,000 landing pages????
I can answer you in a single line, it is really not advisable for you to make that much (1000 to 3000) subdomains that should affect your quality score. YOu need to use different websites for each client as a landinag pages for their SEM campaigns..
Thanks for the reply. Just so I understand full - do you not advice bc it will affect the quality score too much?
Sounds like a challenge indeed, but you have a few choices. If you do sub directories, such as site.domain.com you will be much better off than doing domain.com/landingpage Either way, what is your time line for doing this? I've worked on a similar project before with over 1500 small businesses and launching campaigns for them on Google and Yahoo. Took a few weeks to do and learned a lot from doing it. If you have the time, do it right and will be worth it in the long run. If you want my help, PM me with your contact info and we can setup a call if you like.
I wouldn't take a shotgun approach and try to do a one-size-fits-all. Apply the 80/20 rule. Pick the 20% of companies that you think will do the best with ppc and focus on creating a customized campaign with good customer service. Make a similar offer to the rest, but charge them more so if they want to do it it's worthwhile. Also, since you won't have affiliates all directed to the same offer, I wouldn't bother with separate landing pages for each business I'd just direct link to their existing site and work on optimizing/tuning the whole site.