Website Visitors Are Not Entering Through Your Home Page
Have you considered that your home page is not the only entryway to your Web site? In fact, visitors may never even view your home page, but instead, may access your site through its interior pages. This reality must impact your internal Web site marketing strategy. Especially since visitors are arriving at your site through interior pages:
• Have you ensured that all your Web site pages include a call to action?
• Does the flow of your Web site meet your business objective of generating revenue?
In October 2008, changes to Google’s algorithm affected how Google views and ranks Web site content. For example, duplicating content and information from one Web page to the next is not viewed favorably. Instead, Google prefers that each page contain it’s own content and topic; and ultimately, each page should also be optimized uniquely. This is known as content relevancy; and it greatly impacts the entry point of a visitor to your Web site.
Let’s take an extreme example. If the privacy or legal pages of your Web site were optimized within the header tags and visible text, then theoretically either of these lower priority pages could be ranked for terminologies about “privacy” or “legal” statements. If a visitor enters your Web site from one of these pages, do they contain the appropriate call to action to engage the visitor to further explore your Web site?
If you’re wondering how someone would enter your Web site through an inside page and not through your home page, the answer is fairly simple. Google and other search engines index all of your Web site’s pages. When someone searches for a keyword or phrase, if an inside page is relevant to the search, then the inside page may show up in the search results.
The fact that any Web page may become an entry point, affects the internal marketing of a Web site’s design, layout, and flow. Most companies and their Web site designers spend a lot of time on the home page and not nearly as much on the inside pages.
Capitalizing on interior visitors requires a Web marketing analysis and strategy, versus simple design changes.
To develop an internal Web site marketing strategy, an internet marketing team will evaluate Web site statistics, as well as click density heat maps and your Web site analytics. A variety of questions need to be answered to determine how the internal Web site marketing should be changed:
• How many visitors are reaching the inside pages?
• Which pages are they reaching?
• What do they do once they arrive?
• How and why did they arrive at a specific page?
• How many people visit inside pages of your Web site as an entry point?
• Do they continue to explore your Web site or do they leave upon arrival?
• How long did they stay on those pages?
Look at your Web site’s statistics to learn more about answering these questions and to capitalize on Web site traffic arriving through interior pages. What percentage of visitors are entering through inside pages?
