Many website owners don’t spend much time thinking about where their visitors enter their site. They usually want to see their traffic arrive through the website’s home page.
That is not the best policy to maximize sales.
In fact, for visitors arriving at your site, you should be happy if they arrived on many of the internal pages. By having traffic arrive through the most appropriate pages, for their individual needs, you can increase your sales volumes tremendously.
A common misconception, shared by many website owners, is the desire for traffic to flow through the site’s home page. Partly driven by ego, and partly by the possibility that big dollars were spent designing the home page, many business owners want visitors to see the home page. Unfortunately, the pretty pictures on the home page don’t always translate into sales.
The problems for the online business person, of such a misguided policy, are many. They include loss of visitors who don’t immediately find any useful information; visitors leaving because the home page doesn’t relate to them; and the usual lack of sales and marketing that characterizes most internet home pages.
Instead of worrying about the level of visitor traffic that arrives through the home page, think in terms of conversions to customers and sales revenue instead.
A surprisingly large percentage of website home pages are not very sales oriented. They often show a few products at random, some brief company information, and some nice but often unrelated photographs. In other words, the home page is more focussed on the company itself, than on the potential or existing customer. As you know, the focus must be on the needs of the potential customer or client. It’s all about their requirements, and not about your ideas.
Many website owners believe that if the maximum number of available incoming links point to the home page, it will rank highly in the search engines. They also believe the home page is where Google PageRank should be accumulated. While worthwhile goals in themselves, the results often mean very little in actual sales numbers.
Website home pages are generally introductions to the company in general and the website in particular. It’s more of a home base than a sales and marketing tool. In fact, many home pages are flash laden and slow loading, sending many potential customers away to greener pastures, rather than sticking around to survey the landscape.
The website home page is better thought of as an introduction to the business itself, and not as a sales and marketing device. Because of the generalities necessary on the home page, little opportunity is available to develop a strong customer base. Incoming links to the home page are often better utilized on the site’s internal pages.
Instead of having visitors examine a nice picture of the company’s head office building, sending them to interior pages is often a far better idea.
Website visitors are generally searching for specific knowledge, on general topics of interest, or for product information for possible purchase. This is clearly not the job of the website’s home page. Instead, this yeoman’s work, of information provision and sales and marketing, is the strength of interior site pages.
Most e-mail marketers are aware of the power of internal landing pages, written specifically to sell a certain item. Sending the potential customer to the site’s home page drastically reduces sales. This principle is well known. Less well known, however, is the concept of using the entire set of internal web pages as entry ports for potential customers and clients.
By optimizing internal website pages, and having them properly linked through a site map, the specialized web pages are capable of ranking very well in searches. By carefully targeting one specific keyword phrase per page, and optimizing for it, an entire fleet of highly competitive web pages can set sail on the sea of search rankings.
The power of internal pages is specialization. The informational pages can attract theme relevant natural links to boost link popularity, and to provide a source of PageRank, for further redistribution around the site. The knowledge pages also build trust and a reputation for expertise that often translates into customers and clients as well.
The product and services marketing pages provide specific opportunities for online and offline revenue. By specializing them for individual products and services, they can compete successfully in searches. As entry ports into the site, they are also instant access for sales to customers.
Website owners are well advised to avoid the home page tunnel vision that entraps many other online businesses. Instead of focussing the efforts solely on ranking well for the home page, consider using the entire site as a huge marketing team. Each interior page is like another sales representative, offering a different solution to suit the diverse needs of the various customers.
As an online marketer, you would have all of the internal pages working towards your sales efforts. The additional pages also provide numerous entries into the site for prospective clients and customers. Optimization of internal pages turns many pages loose to compete in the search rankings.
Look beyond the site’s home page, and watch your sales numbers and company revenue grow.
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Wayne Hurlbert provides insigtful information about marketing, promotions, search engine optimization and public relations for websites and business blogs on the popular Blog Business World.
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