What is a Horizontal Site?

When you launched your website or blog, you may have been told to keep it simple – stick to one subject (or vertical), master it, and become an expert on it. With your credibility established, you would soon find visitors beating a path to your site. While a vertical strategy may still work for some businesses, an increasing number are finding horizontal websites to be far more effective at drawing visitors.

Horizontal Content

A horizontal strategy is quite a shift in thinking from the vertical tradition that so many businesses have been using. Instead of focusing on one area, a horizontal site takes a broad approach, covering many subject areas to attract new audiences.

The main idea is to cast your net further to increase the exposure of your company and your brand. And you don’t need deep pockets to do it. Even a small specialty business can go horizontal with the right planning.

Creating a Horizontal Site

As with any good web marketing strategy, the basic rule here is to provide content that people want to read. Search engines have refined their algorithms to better recognize "good" content, and they will direct visitors to sites that have well–written information of value to Internet users.

To get started, you need to do some analysis of your site’s visitors. Where are they spending most of their time when they visit your site? What blog posts or articles attract the most attention? The answers to these questions will help you decide where to take your site.

You may also have some ideas of your own. For example, if you own a hardware store and you want to expand from the place people go to buy nails to the local home renovation centre, you might add blog posts or articles about decorating tips and popular paint colors, how–to articles on minor home repairs, or tips on saving energy and water.

And don’t forget the most important aspect of horizontal sites – fresh content. Once you start expanding your site you need to keep it updated. If your content is new and interesting, people will get in the habit of checking your site and will return often. They will also be more likely to spread the word about your business.

Creating Content

Your area of expertise may be limited to your core business, so you might be wondering how you can create content in areas you know little about.

The easiest way to keep content coming, especially for busy entrepreneurs, is to outsource it. Web marketing companies can design a schedule to ensure content is updated regularly, and they have the resources to create the content for you.

Horizontal websites are a new and effective way of drawing more visitors to your site. By taking a wide view of your business, you greatly increase your chances to reach new markets.