Building a strong foundation of your business’s website is not a walk in the park. You need to have a good understanding of every possible hack to get a high SERP rank. The use of subdomains is amongst the highly recommended ways through which you can enhance your website’s SEO.
Now, you may be wondering – When to use a subdomain? How does it improve your website’s SEO?
Don’t worry, we will be answering all these questions in this post. So, just keep reading…
What is a Subdomain?
A subdomain is a part of your main domain name. It is a child domain name that works as a part of a bigger primary domain name. For instance, blog.123.com is a subdomain of 123.com.
Subdomains are particularly used to create an easy-to-remember web address that usually contains content, which is original and relevant to the parent site.
When is it best to use Subdomain?
We have got some instances of subdomains that will help you get a good idea as to when you should use a subdomain to level up your SEO game altogether.
1. Location Specific Content
If you are selling products/services to a UK-based audience, then, of course, you don’t need to confuse the people in the USA. Right? So, if you happen to operate a multinational business, it would be a good idea to manage different regions with different subdomains.
For example, Craigslist separates locations using their different subdomains. It uses newyork.craigslist.org for New York and minneapolis.craigslist.org for Minneapolis.
2. Complimentary Services
Blogs are undoubtedly a great source of useful information and allow websites to attract huge traffic too. However, your core business website may not highlight the blog page excessively.
So, it’s good to separate your business’s blog page and main website with the help of a subdomain. Because the blog page is meant to have a different purpose than the services/products page, it’s beneficial to decouple the two using subdomains.
In the same way, websites can simply use a subdomain for their forums or support web pages. Thus, choosing a subdomain appears to be an excellent choice.
3. Displaying Range of Products and Services
Having a complete stack of products and services displayed on one website can confuse your users and it may even affect the conversion rates too.
With a distinctive subdomain, you can focus on one product or service at a time. This will give the users a more genuine experience interacting with your business’s products/services.
Advantages of Subdomain
At the end of the day, the purpose of the subdomain is to provide the target audience with content that is different from what is available on the main domain. Below are some benefits of subdomains that allow improvement of the overall SEO of your website:
- Adding Keywords into Website URL: It does not cost anything to add keywords to your website URL. Though there are plenty of restrictions, it is a good idea to practice keyword insertion in URLs. However, don’t insert keywords forcefully, it should look and sound natural, or else, it won’t make any sense.
- Build Niche Authority: With a subdomain, you can easily target a particular niche. It is easier to boost authority with multiple subdomains in a small market as compared to a bigger one.
- Improve UX Design: Google analyses the user experience of the website while calculating your SEO score. So, it is essential to keep your target audience satisfied and happy when they visit your website. However, websites having content in abundance can hamper the user experience.
Irrespective of all the above advantages of a subdomain, there are some disadvantages of using subdomains as well that are as follows:
- If you choose to split the website into a primary domain and a subdomain, it will drastically impact the website’s growth and development. It becomes a costly affair to manage the website as you need to feed both the main domain and subdomain with more and more content.
- The name that you choose for your domain and subdomain should not be lengthy. Although this won’t cause any issues related to SEO, the users online might refer to stretchy URLs as unreliable websites. Consequently, this can hamper your business’s credibility in the industry.
Steps to Create a Subdomain for your Website
Creating a subdomain is an easy task. Many of the web hosting service providers offer GUI-based control panels, such as cPanel, that allow you to create subdomains quickly.
Here are the steps that you need to follow for creating a subdomain using cPanel:
- Firstly, log in to your cPanel account and find the subdomain option using the search bar. It is usually present under the domains section.
- Click on the subdomain option and you will get access to the option to create a subdomain. Enter the subdomain name and select a particular main domain name if you have multiple domain names linked with your cPanel account.
- Now, select the root directory in which you want to store all the data of the subdomain. Be sure the directory you choose is different from the directories of other sites or subdomains.
- Upon clicking the ‘create’ button, your subdomain will get created. Just type in the URL bar of your browser to see if it’s functional or not.
- Now, if the subdomain is not functional then there could be an issue. You may have not added the record for the subdomain in your DNS settings, which is an essential step to complete the subdomain creation process.
Conclusion
Hopefully, now you have a fair understanding of the subdomain and the role it plays to add value to your website’s SEO. When it comes to ranking high in search engine results, subdomains not only provide value to your target audience but also widens the horizon for adding SEO-friendly content.
We would suggest you create subdomains for your website and see how it turns out for your business revenue and overall growth. In case, you already have a subdomain created for your website, let us know what impact it has made on your website’s traffic.
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