Subfolder on existing domain or new domain? Which would you choose?

[dsinger]

I have been giving it a lot of thought lately.  I manage five brand websites for well recognized national brands in the child care vertical.  Our websites primarily serve as brochures and lead generators.  While we have a blog on each site, I am leaning toward creating content separate from our "brochure style sales copy" that targets each of our individual personas.  While it is our primary objective to drive lead volume up, I think people are at various stages in the decision process and even post decision, where we can do a better job nurturing them, engaging them, proving brand worth and all of the psychological reasons people choose and stay with a brand.

With that, if it was your call to make, would you create a subfolder for each persona target, i.e. example.com/persona1/target-theme-1, or would you create a brand new experience on a new domain?

Essentially, both options will provide interesting content, tips, advice, videos, downloads, etc.  But, creating a new domain may help separate people from our sales copy, so they don't feel so pressured.  I would build out linking for those who wish to engage at that level, but don't want to treat all visitors the same, like we currently do.

I look forward to an interesting conversation about this.  Also, if anyone has done this very well in the past or currently, I would love to see some example sites.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Of course. You can see one of mine here at http://linkbuilding.inetseo.co.uk.

That started to rank after less than a week of it going live.

-Andy

[Vizergy]

Indeed - everything I said goes equally for sub-domains.

[dsinger]

hey andy,

Curious if you have any real examples of subdomain sites you have done that rank well and fast?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I am making use of subdomains more and more and the thing I love, is that they start to rank much more quickly.

There has been a lot of discussion on this recently, and one very similar to this whereby there was a requirement to create a branded experience, but something that wasn't wholly in-keeping with the rest of the site.

The result was that subdomains were build to great effect. Because of the way they work, you can gain a lot of leverage from the primary site and people recognise that they haven't been shifted off somewhere else.

There is less of an argument to go with sub folders today.

-Andy

[Vizergy]

I get what you are saying about separating the new content from the sales content but I think I would still go with the sub-directory.

You have well established domain names that Google associates with the well known brand - stick with it.  Your new pages will rank for the terms for which they are relevant and when they do, the relevant traffic will go straight to those pages, never having to even see the sales copy unless they choose to click in to it.

That is how I believe I would approach this.  New domains require building authority from the ground up - absolutely achievable, we all do it... but when you have an already established, totally relevant domain.... use it.