How Do Subdomains Affect SEO?

Chad Faith
Chad Faith

Director of Content

subdomains

In the web development world, it’s important to make sure that every element of the website is geared toward these elements: making sure that your visitors get quality information in a hassle-free manner and ensuring that your SEO campaigns are optimized. The latter is important in order to increase traffic to the site. A website may be very well-developed and provide useful information, but if its SEO ranking is not good, then very few people will get to know about it. One of the important elements in determining SEO rankings is the design of a site’s subdomains. Some of the ways in which they can be used to increase rankings include:  

As Blog Hosting Platforms

For a website’s SEO rankings to be adequate, one of the tools that can be used is a blog within the site. A blog provides dynamic content, which if written well will be appealing to customers. The changing nature of the information on a blog makes it more useful to people who are browsing in general, and this is why you ought to have one.

You can use a subdomain to host a blog in which you can share information about the services and products you provide, as well as any other useful information. You can also use it as a means of getting in touch with your audience, such as by also using the blog as a forum or help desk. The latter can also be hosted on a dedicated subdomain. If all these are connected to a specific website, that website’s SEO rankings are likely to rise.

As A Means of Showcasing Other Product Lines

A rule of thumb in web design is to always make sure that your site is never cluttered. This puts potential customers off. What if you have a very wide variety of products to offer? To improve your SEO rankings, you can feature different related products on other subdomains, which are then connected to your main site. This way, you get to showcase all you have to offer in an organized manner, and to also prove to SEO bots that your site is worth bumping up the ranks because it has so much to offer. This is a powerful way in which a subdomain can be used to influence a site’s SEO ranks.   

Catering for Regional Variation

Suppose the information you offer changes depending on one’s geographical location, you can use subdomains to represent these other locations rather than stuffing your main website with information that will serve all your visitors. For instance, if you provide goods or services that are in demand by English-speaking and French-speaking audiences, you can use a subdomain to host information for people visiting from countries where French is the main language spoken. This way, you don’t have to install systems to automatically change the language on the site depending on GeoIP location. This route can be messy and make a website difficult to use. By using subdomains in this way, you can get genuine traffic from all parts of the world with greater ease, and this can also help to improve your overall SEO score.