Using subdomain names has become a common practice for business owners. Before you decide to put your site at your primary domain (www.johnscoffeeshop.com), you should understand how having a subdomain can help your business.
Your Content
Do you have an excess of content related to a specific topic that’s crowding your website? If so, you may want to create a subdomain that gives that content its own website to call home. This is especially true if you do not have an easy way to add more content to your site. You can use a good content management system to manage and optimize all of the content at your subdomain and build a significant amount of high quality pages. This is necessary to satisfy your visitors and the search engines.
Your Rankings
Create a website subdomain for your site can postitively impact your search engine optimization results. Search engines recognize subdomains as unique Web addresses unrelated to their parent domain name. This allows subdomains to appear alongside your website on a search engine results page, which may accomplish two goals: enhancing your legitimacy and pushing your competition farther down the list.
Your Niche
Subdomains typically have a very focused theme, which makes them the perfect place to use highly targeted keywords aimed at a specific niche – you may even use these keywords in the subdomain name itself (organiccoffee.johnscoffeeshop.com would be used specifically for their organic coffee content).
Your Backlinks
By linking to your main website from your subdomain, you can increase the number of backlinks that go to your original domain name. Backlinks, also known as incoming links, are highly valued by search engines and should play a major role in your SEO strategy. The more backlinks you have, the higher probability that your site will get a higher Google PageRank.
Your Budget
Subdomains can help you get “more bang for your buck” when you register a domain name. Instead of paying domain name registration fees for a new website, create a website subdomain with unique design and content. (Many Web hosting companies provide a set number of subdomains at no extra cost – be sure to inquire whether subdomains are included with your domain name registration.)
Your Brand
Subdomains are Web addresses built around your business’ main website. This increases a customers’ sense of familiarity and trust, which helps you support your brand. If you’re considering breaking your website down into pieces, subdomains let customers know those pieces are part of the same pie. Having your content marketing site at a subdomain can be a great way to funnel traffic into your primary domain website. This is especially true if you cannot edit/add pages and content to your primary domain website. You can use your subdomain site to add/edit/optimize content to appear higher in the search engine results.
