Entrepreneurs and businesses are frequently faced with the question of divergence or convergence. Is it best to bundle my offerings (services or products) into one package, or separate them as distinct and independent? Marketers face the same challenge in asking themselves when it's appropriate to talk about multiple things in an ad and when it's best to really narrow in on one primary point.
Those answers, of course, depend on the unique circumstances surrounding each individual case. But when it comes to a website strategy, there are strong advantages to taking the divergent approach.
Consider first, what happens when you try to put everything on one website. You've likely seen sites like this. Sites where there are hundreds of links, images everywhere, blinking multi-color graphics and banners, button after button, each vying for the users attention. Everything competes with everything else - and in the long run, you simply compete against yourself.
Most sites have what they'd call a "primary navigation" space. But what links do you decide to put there? The obvious answer is that you should give most exposure to those links that are most suited to the specific type of visitor coming to your site.
If it's a buyer - you may want links to listings and buyer information most readily apparent. If it's someone looking for a home in a specific neighborhood you specialize in, then you'll likely want those primary links to be different - perhaps pointing to content about that neighborhood, listings specific to that neighborhood, a schedule of neighborhood events, etc.
But how do you know? You don't. And because you don't, you put links there that may or may not be suited to whatever visitor you happened to have attracted. Your site, like so many, suffers from dilution. Every link you add, every page you create, dilutes the value of the every other link or page on your site.
The bottom line is that the visitors that come to your site are confronted with the task of digesting all that information, determining your sites relevancy to their needs, and figuring out where to go to find what they're specifically looking for.
Statistics vary, but most agree that all of that must happen in less than about 20 seconds (sometimes far less). Remember, the more you put on your homepage, the less likely that is to occur. You'll start getting fewer and fewer "click-throughs" as you try to cater to more and more client-types.
So what's the solution? Divergence is an option.
Instead of lumping everything you do into one site... all the collective knowledge that you've exposed to represent your experience and expertise, simply create a site for each niche you serve.
If you specialize in 3 specific neighborhoods and one new construction area, build a website for each. Start by asking yourself "what kinds of clients do I most want to attract?" and force yourself to be specific. The more clearly you identify your various targets, the more effectively you'll be able to customize your website to attract them, and the more efficient your overall online strategy will become.
With a website wholly dedicated to one particular client type, you can now saturate that site with deep content, specifically relevant to your target client's needs. Everything you put on that site will shout "this is for you", and the likelihood of building that 20 second connection with your visitor increases exponentially. Your click-through rates will climb, and as they do, so too will the leads you generate.
What's more, it's what I call a "self-propelling" approach, a strategy that builds upon itself. As search engines find and crawl through your now highly targeted website, they'll see that 100% of your content is dedicated to that niche, and your ranking for phrases most likely used by that target client will climb dramatically.
If someone searches for "homes at eaglewood golf course", for instance, search engines would see a site fully dedicated to just that, and are far more likely to grace you with high "relevancy". As your relevancy climbs, so does your organic search traffic, and as search traffic climbs, search engines see that people are clicking on your site, and assume greater relevancy, so your rankings climb even higher.
But the benefits don't end there. Think now, about evolution. Every successful online strategy must evolve. No successful website was born successful - they all had to evolve. By closely monitoring traffic, visitor behavior, click-paths (the path a visitor "creates" as they peruse your site), departure points, page view time, and more, you can start to make modifications to your site to improve its performance. Continuous modifications, over time, are crucial.
But how do you know what to modify, when everything you do is lumped together in one site. It's incredibly difficult. The simple fact is that the more you have on a website, the more variables you introduce, and the more difficult it becomes to determine their affect on your visitors. But with highly specialized websites, the task isn't nearly so daunting.
There are, as a matter of fact, additional benefits (and perhaps I'll write more later), but these certainly seem the clearest.
