Don’t Blindfold Your Customers: 4 Tips for Optimizing Beyond Your Home Page

Most business owners and web designers spend too much time on creating the "perfect" home page.

They forget that search engines index your entire web site. Search engine results invite visitors to arrive at almost any page on your site depending on what they searched for. And, if they talk about your site online, most bloggers and previous customers skip right over your home page to instead share links to specific pages deeper in your web site, too.

Many of Your Visitors Never See Your Home Page at All!
The result is that most visitors to your web site may never even see your homepage. Does your web site’s design reflect this? Or are you asking your site’s visitors to essentially shop blind-folded when they miss the introductory information on your home page?

4 strategies for optimizing “beyond” your home page
Only optimizing your web site's home page is not enough.  Implement these tips to improve your site’s online sales for the many visitors who never see your home page.

1. Analyze your traffic:  Start by evaluating your own traffic reports to determine how well your internal pages meet the expectations of newly arrived visitors. For example, on my own web site, only 43% of new visitors arrive at my www.ScottFox.com home page. Your site’s traffic is likely similar.

Once you realize how many visitors skip right past your homepage, you will understand that ALL of the popular product pages on your site need to tell a convincing, credible, and consistent sales story, too.

Finding the most popular non-home-page arrival pages on your site can reveal where your site most needs to be optimized. Making those landing pages more helpful can help you increase your sales for all the customers who never see your homepage.

2. Optimize product pages, too: Product pages should not assume too much (like that the visitor has already seen your home page). Treat each product page as its own “home page” optimized with keywords and informative (convincing) sales copy. This should concisely restate the products’ value proposition for visitors who arrive there without ever having seen your home page.

3. Consistent navigation: Make the links and menu the same on every page. This will help both customers and search engines easily find the products that they are looking for and speed them on their way toward purchase.

4. Use deep-links to deliver visitors where they want to go: Of course, print and broadcast ads will need to use your home page URL because it’s likely shorter and easier for the off-line audience to remember. But online, if you are running any text ads, banner ads, or affiliate ads, be sure to link them deeper into your web site. This will deliver potential customers to the specific product or information pages optimized to meet their expectations. The quicker that you give visitors the specific information they were looking for when they clicked on a link to your site, the closer you are to making the sale.

Meet Customer Expectations to Increase Online Sales
The key to customer sales conversion is to meet their expectations. If a visitor clicked on a link about kitty litter, you are going to have a much better chance at converting her into a paying customer if you deliver her to a page that is about kitty litter.

So the question is: if she got there without having seen your home page, is your kitty litter product page ready to convert her into a paying customer?

If not, implement the 4 recommendations above to optimize “beyond the home page.” This will help you offer the best, most specific info you can on every page of your site. And the more helpful you are, even to potential customers who arrive at your site without visiting your home page, the more likely those customers will help you make more money.

What do you think? What are your favorite customer conversion tips?

Comments

[David Peters]

Hi Scott,
Great post, thanks. I think what you're saying is especially true in 2 areas in particular:

1. Pay per click (ppc) advertising with Google AdWords. I made the mistake early on by not landing customers to well written, relevant landing pages. I've had great success making sure that my ad copy uses the same keywords and shares some of the same copy text as what is written on the inner page I'm linking the ad. Which, by the way, is never my home page. I think it's important to get your potential customers to exactly what they're looking for in as few clicks as possible.
2. I've also found when using content, or article marketing, as a strategy to make sure I link readers in the resource box (author's bio) to a relevant page on my site.

Thanks again,
David

[Scott Fox, Click Millionaire]

Another technique that deserves mention here is to add a Custom Search Box to your web site. This can help surface the "buried treasure" that your site visitors may be looking for.

More details here on this post:
Buried Treasure: http://www.scottfox.com/2009/05/buried-treasure-googles-free-custom-search-box-tool.html