Back in those days, the term microsites had often been used interchangeably with mini-sites, those one page stand-alone Web pages used by direct marketers in the 90s.

Microsites are perfectly acceptable to serve as landing pages or hubs for search engine advertising. This is one main reason for creating microsites –  to create a hiper-focused website that meets the needs of a specific search query – and to satisfy Google’s Quality Score criteria.

Pros of using Microsites:

• Visitors can quickly navigate to the content most relevant to their search
• Marketers can use the data from those choices to naturally segment their audience
• Build around a set of reusable templates that let you leverage the design assets of one microsite concept across a number of campaigns
• Microsites live outside the formal framework of your main website, they can often be deplyed quickly
• Use A/B testing to compare the performance of one microsite against an alternative single-page landing page.

Cons of using Microsites:

• Forces users to adapt to different user interfaces when they stumble across the microsite while exploring the main site
• May cause confusion
• A poorly designed microsite can actually reduce conversions
• To  make a microsite effective, requires long-term maintenance, which can be expensive.

 

Read more about microsites:

Content Marketing With Microsites: Pros, Con, Examples & Best Practices