Everything to know about subdomains and how they affect your site’s SEO

Subdomains are an important part of digital marketing and can help to categorise all the content on your website. But what actually are they and how do they work? We’ve got the lowdown on subdomains and how they can boost (or bust) your website’s SEO.

What is a subdomain?

Subdomains are additions to your website URLs that organise and categorise your site’s content. It’s made up of 3 parts:

• The top level domain (TLD), which is the extension on the end of a URL. Take HubSpot, for example: in their URL, hubspot.com, the TLD would be .com

• The second level domain (SLD), which is the creative bit – typically the name of your business. For HubSpot, that would be hubspot

• The subdomain is any additional part that comes before the SLD. This separates content from the rest of the site. For example, blog.hubspot.com takes site visitors to the HubSpot blog to differentiate their blog from the rest of their site

Subdomains are often confused with a subdirectory. A subdirectory – something like hubspot.com/our-story – will direct visitors to an ‘about us’ page, but the URL will still fall under the main website.

Why are subdomains useful?

Because site visitors are essentially directed to a separate website when they visit a subdomain, Google treats subdomains as their own websites. Both subdirectories and subdomains can be good for SEO, but whatever you do to a subdomain page isn’t associated with your primary domain. This means that if you have a specific SEO goal in mind for a subdomain that may not necessarily align with the rest of your website, Google won’t punish you for not having a cohesive SEO strategy.

Subdomains organise your content to give visitors a good experience and make it easier for Google to crawl your site. They also work to boost your domain authority, which improves SEO if you’re sticking to SEO best practices.

When should you use a subdomain?

There are a variety of instances in which building a subdomain is the way to go. One of the most common is when your site is available in a range of different languages. Google will be able to focus on the correct audience and you’ll be able to better organise your content. Subdomains are also handy if you want to add a major tool to your website – like an online shop – but you don’t want that tool to impact your main page.

Before you start adding in subdomains left, right and centre, we recommend chatting with a web building expert (like us!). When your site’s SEO is at stake, it’s always best to get professional advice to avoid being punished by Google’s infamous AI. To learn more about subdomains or to get a personalised marketing plan for your website, get in touch with the Zib Digital team today.