Can I run a successful SEO campaign for a subdomain?

[teachbanzai]

My company has been around for several years now and hasn't really paid much mind to SEO or search engine rankings, so now I'm an in-house marketer with moderate SEO knowledge. We're setting up an article site with our help pages and blog under a subdomain so our writers can easily post articles without having to go through developers every time, as our root domain was set up with a custom in-house CMS. Is it possible for me to run a successful SEO campaign for our article site subdomain? I get that the root domain wouldn't benefit from any SEO authority the new site obtains, but my hands are tied.

[TimHolmes]

It would certainly be possible to market from a sub domain, but it would in my opinion be better if you could still stick to the root domain for added value.

Could you developers not install say a wordpress installation to a single directory on your root domain. e.g. /blog? Or is it already taken?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Yes it would, in the end you should have about the same potential on a subdomain as you have on the root domain. In the end the biggest impact that you can make is by making sure you just do great work. Write the best content and make sure at the same time that the content will get promoted. That way you should be able to beat whatever subdomain or root domain over time.

[teachbanzai]

The problem is that our hosting platform is in a completely different programming language, if that makes sense. If we were to host another WordPress blog and want to put it on the same domain, it would have to be on another server and then load balanced, which would be a programming nightmare and consume thousands of dollars in hours of labor and other costs.