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Key Takeaways
Don’t build a mini site until your main site ranks top three: This is a strategy you earn. If your primary site isn’t dominating – top three or four for your market’s key terms – a second site just splits your effort, and the man who chases two birds catches none. You also can’t control which site Google decides to value, so you risk peeling rankings off your main brand. Max out the primary site first, then go hunting for more.
Target the condo building, not the market: The more specific the search, the less competitive it is and the higher the intent. Conrad built a mini site for an Outer Banks client around one condo building, and it ranks number one for the building name. It only pulls 300 to 400 visitors a month, but those people are looking at that exact building – and with six to eight units in it, the client converts a lot of them.
Stack the SERP with organic and paid on both sites: Brand site ranking organically, mini site ranking organically, then PPC running on top of both. One client holds four of the top eight results for their key terms – in theory more than half the available traffic. Some of those non-branded keywords convert to bookings at 4.5%, which is an A++ result worth grabbing every click you can.
A mini site is a real site, so budget 25 to 35 hours: The days of an exact-match domain ranking on its own are long gone. The builds that work have unique content, unique photos, an about page, a things-to-do page, a nearby-attractions page. Throw up a thin site with no content and it won’t rank or convert – and if you spin up 20 doorway-style condo sites at once, Google will see it and ding you.
Five to ten bookings pays the whole thing back: Taken to the full degree – real content, even on-site booking functionality – a mini site might run $5,000 to $10,000. On high-intent building keywords, five or six bookings gets you to break-even and around ten puts you in profit. Few marketing investments pay back that fast.
Under a franchise flag, a mini site is your identity insurance: If you’re a subdirectory on a franchise domain, you’ve traded away control and differentiation – and when owner leads come through the main flag site, how do they reliably get to you? Conrad would take conradscoolcabins.com over conradscabins.itrip.com every time. Your own site means leads route straight to you and you keep a brand outside the chain. Just check your franchise contract before you build.
Tag mini site emails and market to the segment: Every signup on a building-specific site is telling you exactly what they want, so tag them that way and feed the tag into your main list. Same logic for a niche site: someone who found a pet-friendly site through a post on the best dog parks should only get pitched pet-friendly properties. The mini site becomes a segmentation machine, not just a rankings play.
Check your domain registrar before buying anything: Clients constantly discover they already own condo-building and market domains sitting unused in their registrar. Conrad describes sifting through those lists like a flea market: most of it is worthless, but every so often there’s gold – an exact-match domain for a building or niche you actually manage. Start there before you shop.
Treat the mini site as a seed in the ground: You’re probably not going to build many links to a secondary site, so this is a patience play: launch it well, wait for Google to give it some traction, then invest more once you see wins. Work it cohesively with your main brand rather than expecting an overnight ranking.
What We Cover In This Episode
Conrad and Paul dig into mini sites – small, focused secondary websites targeting a condo building, niche, or guest segment. They cover when you’ve earned the right to build one, how to stack the SERP with organic and paid together, what a quality build actually takes, and why franchise operators especially should own their own site.
