Blog - SEO Better? MyCompany.com/blog or marketing.MyCompany.com/blog? Percent difference?

[Joseph.Lusso]

We started blogging aggressively 3 months ago to bolster our organic search. We are building a new website and wonder if hosting our blog directly on our site is better than marketing.mycompnay.com? Is MyComanpany.com/blog a better choice - what percentage of SEO value would it be? We are building a new WordPress website.

Our blog is currently hosted on a subdomain with HubSpot software. WILL OUR SEO BE SIGNIFICANTLY MORE EFFECTIVE HOST THE WEBSITE DIRECTLY OUR DOT COM? It won't be as convenient with HS tool but we want the best possible SEO.

[dohertyjf]

Hey Joseph -

Good question here. It's pretty impossible to say what percentage better a subfolder (/blog/) is than a subdomain (blog.mycompany.com), but there have been many case studies done over the years that it is better for SEO overall. At my old company, we moved from a subdomain to a subfolder and sorted out some technology (went to WordPress from TypePad), usability, and internal linking issues. Over the course of about 3 months we saw a great (200%+) increase in traffic. BUT, we also had a lot of content that should have been ranking, were cranking up the quality and quantity of content we put on there, and actively improving our site's overall SEO. These results not typical, your mileage may vary, etc.

I think in your case, I would say that you need to weigh the pros and cons of the effort required to make this work technically with the focus on creating amazing content that gets shared and linked to. I think often we focus too much on smaller technical things like subfolder v subdomain, while neglecting the real reason we are blogging/creating content (to build an audience).

I don't necessarily think this is a make it or break it thing for you, but if you have the chance to put it on a subfolder and it's not too challenging technically (I'm not familiar with the ins-and-outs of this with HubSpot), I'd recommend a subfolder like mycompany.com/blog/

Good luck!