When you think of your web presence, what do you think of?
The “Contact Us” page? The site map?
Of course not, you think of your homepage. That is a natural thought process, and it is not wrong. After all, that is where your business cards, brochures and all other marketing collateral point people.
What many people dont realize though is that a large portion of people viewing your site may never see the homepage. In todays world of tweets, blogs, diggs and facebook links a large portion of the web is powered by specific links. People don’t always point other people to your homepage, they point them to the exact thing on your site that interests them.
You also have to consider the fact that a large portion of search engine results point people to sub-pages of your site.
With these thoughts in mind, you can then look to your site analytics for further information on how people enter your site. We, like millions of others, use Google Analytics. If you go to the Content tab and lick on “entrance Paths” you can get some good information on how people enter your site. For the sake of this article I went into one of our larger corporate sites and will use their numbers as an example. I will leave the site unnamed, but refer to it as Pacerit.com.
Pacerit.com had 13,850 visitors last month. Of those visitors, only 38.96% accessed the site via the homepage. That means that approximately 60% of visitors first viewed this site via a sub-page. Fortunately for this company our analytics show that most of those visitors are quickly navigating where we want them to go, or are getting what they need from the page they entered on.
These numbers obviously illustrate the importance of understanding your analytics, but they also can be a light bulb moment for many people. Often times throughout the development process people tend to focus too much on the homepage. This can be due to budgetary constraints or to simple poor planning on the part of the developer. If you are in charge of your company web presence you need to ask yourself and your developer this question: “What is our strategy for our sub-pages?”. Too often sub-pages jsut get the basic treatment of a watered down header and some basic content
We recommend that you still incorporate core elements of your homepage into your sub-pages, and here are some examples of what we recommend here at Pacer Design Studios :
- call to action (you should always be selling)
- search engine info relative to that page
- relative sidebar links to that particular page
- easy links back to the homepage, or to other content rich areas of the site
Use these tips and monitor your analytics and you will be well on your way to better bounce rates and more time on site.
Enjoy!
Better yet….Contact Us today to set up a free consultation and we can help get you on your way to building a better brand.