As a professional business, we will all have a multi-page website. But what if we want to trial a product or service away from the everyday stuff? What if we have an announcement to make that doesn’t really fit in? What if we want to run an independent special offer? Can a single page website on its own domain do the job?
The answer in many cases is absolutely, yes it can. There are two issues to bear in mind, however. The first is that it’s not on the company’s website, so will customers trust it? Overcoming this obstacle may only be possible if the path to the site/page comes from somewhere clearly genuine – for example, single page websites can be great to fulfil offers linked to in sales letters or print advertisements.
The second issue concerns the difficulty of getting the site/page ranked in the search engines. Now, if it’s a temporary site to service an event or offer, this may not matter. However, if there are long-term ambitions for the site, we’ll need to bear in mind that the search terms we can target are going to be very limited. As we’re all aware, differing search terms need their own pages.
Getting noticed early
However, there’s definitely an SEO advantage in having a single page website, if there’s a chance that what it covers may eventually be expanded. Getting the domain noticed by the search engines as early as possible is a great strategy.
Finally, a single page website can be designed with mobile users in mind. This is often its biggest attraction. Without needing any navigational clutter, it can get straight to the point. I’ve just built one to run a highly popular competition, and by putting everything on a dedicated I site I could make it fast, purposeful and easy to use, and avoid any unsightly impacts on my main site’s everyday visitor analytics.