What Size Website Should Your Start-Up Business Build?

If you or you company are in the planning phase of a beginning online business venture, you are probably overwhelmed by the number of decisions that you must reach. One you should not fail to consider in your business plan relates to website size. Should you create a small website, a mini-site in the beginning, with the plan of building a virtual empire of such sites? Should you, instead, lay the foundation for a large website, although you would allow it to grow slowly rather than starting off as a large site?

Before I get into the pros and cons of each side of this dilemma, I should let you know what this decision is not. The question is not necessarily related to how large your business will ultimately become. Companies that follow either approach can both eventually become quite large and successful. Neither should your decision be based upon some preconceived notion of your target market or your niche. The planned size of a website in the beginning can lead to ultimate growth and financial success of the business as a whole.

I should alert you that reading this article will not automatically give you the right answer to this particular question of size. Instead, what I hope to provide is a set of some things for you to consider so that whether you build a small website immediately or lay the groundwork for a mega-site, you’ll understand that decision’s impact upon key variables now and in the future.

Small websites should be concentrated on a narrow sub-niche built around a cohesive, limited set of relatively long-tail keywords. Sites that are designed to become quite large eventually will develop most of their content in the same focused way, but they will also begin search engine optimization on the shorter, very high competition keywords at the same time.

The growth models of the two are very different after each has satisfactorily mastered the beginning, narrow sub-niche. Those who have taken the mini-site approach, will begin to duplicate their success by building a new, small site in another sub-niche with a new set of long-tailed keywords. Large site businesses will instead build another section onto their growing original site. This new section, over time, is joined by others (think of new departments being added to a sporting goods store, for example). Each new section takes on a new sub-niche. So, as the big sites grow ever larger with more and more categories, departments or silos, the business with mini-sites might create twenty or fifty or a hundred individual “storefronts.”

Positive cash flow can be established sooner with the small site approach. This is partly due to such a business not investing resources into those most competitive, high level keywords. In the long run however, over the course of many months or even years, the mega-sites can become competitive for the high traffic keywords and might even become recognized as an authority in the broadly based market.

Let me move now to some of the important practical matters that are impacted by your decision on this important matter.

The first has to do with start up cost. When you plan to build a large site, the architecture of the whole site (as it will eventually become) must be in place. Consequently, although the mini-site and the eventual mega-site may be the same size at launch, the model for the larger site costs more at start-up. Laying the foundation for silo sites is inherently costlier than the smaller, less expensive mini-site.

A second practical difference pertains to your approach to keywords. Your keyword research for a smaller site will be much more tightly focused upon the long-tail terms, especially those that show commercial intent (thus more likely to convert sooner rather than later). With the large site plan, you will conduct your research with two focal points: the lower competition but more targeted long-tails and the highest level, most competitive short tails (which are less likely to convert immediately, but the users of which might be nurtured into eventually becoming customers.

The last practical ramification has to do with page rank. Page rank is impacted by a number of variables in search engine algorithms (formulas), but one of those is the number of pages that a site has (assuming that the site has a search engine friendly linking structure). Thus, it is more difficult to achieve a high page rank than it is for a large site because of its inherent value on that variable.

So I hope I have given you some food for thought, even though I haven’t provided a clear cut answer to you. Perhaps, though, these ideas provide you with an inclination as to which approach you should take given your own unique business circumstances.