The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Search the Web, flip through guides, and nearly every bit of advice about your homepage will make the same assumption: it’s the first page users will visit. Perhaps. But, then again, perhaps not.

As any site owner can attest, a significant amount of traffic starts at their homepage. Whether it's users going straight to www.apple.com, or searching for “Apple” on Google and making their way from there, the homepage is prime real estate. However, more and more frequently, users are arriving at other pages on your site first.

Users most often conduct Web searches to solve problems. So when they click on an organic search result, they may go directly to a specific product page on your site, or a page describing your services in detail. And, if they click on your paid search ad, this will take them to one of your landing pages (which should NOT be your homepage!) Either way, their first encounter with your site will happen on a page other than your homepage. Only afterwards, will users go to your homepage to dig a little deeper.

So what does this mean for homepage design? You need to start with a new assumption: your homepage isn’t necessarily the first page a user sees, but it is the page they see after your landing page.

Starting with the assumption that a homepage is the first thing a user sees leads to a few simple but effective conclusions, like these, from Heidi Cool at the Web Development Blog:

• Tell them where they are: Your homepage should make clear the name of the organization and the nature of your business.
• Encourage them to come in and look around: Give them a taste (but just a taste) of what you offer, so they want to learn more.
• Provide clear directions to the entrance: Show them how to enter and navigate your space.

Very good advice, especially from the point of view of a user who lands on your homepage first. But what about a user from one of your landing pages? They'll want answers to questions like "who exactly are you?" but they're not really in exploration mode. Rather than going to your homepage to look around, they're trying to answer questions that will help them decide whether to convert. These could include:

• How reliable is the business making me an offer?
• How long have they been around?
• Do their previous customers have anything positive to say?
• How do they stack up against competitors?

In other words, a user who explores your homepage after seeing your landing page, but before deciding to convert, is looking to answer a fundamental question: "Can I trust you?"

I've already discussed ways to provide trustworthy support for your offering, so I won't repeat them here. I'll simply add a bullet to Heidi's list of homepage essentials above: "Give them a reason to trust you." Especially if your homepage is not the first thing a user sees, building trust is critical.

Next week, I'll join forces with Clickable Graphic Designer Penny Sudtunyarat for an introduction to "Landing Page Design Basics." Stay tuned!

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If your paid visitors go to the homepage after arriving at your landing page, then the landing page SUCKS by definition.  

The point of the landing page is to continue the story.

- The 'story' starts with the search query,

- Followed by the click on your compelling ads,

- Followed by the visit to your compelling landing page,

- Followed by the desired action/conversion (additional page view, download software, whatever)

and NOT a visit to your home page.

Chris

Chris:

As you've made clear, an excursion to your homepage shouldn't be part of the search marketing "story": an ideal PPC sales funnel starts with a query and ends with a sale. Nonetheless, this doesn't mean that you should neglect the possibility that many users, for whatever reason, are going to stray off course from time to time.

This might be because they always check out companies before converting (I usually search for third-party reviews before giving my credit card info to an unfamiliar e-commerce site), because they need to come back a few times before making a purchase (especially for more costly and complex products), or simply because they've got time to kill and they're clicking around.

But just because a user takes a different path than the one we've prescribed, there's no reason why their journey shouldn't end in a conversion. And while I absolutely agree that you shouldn't compromise your homepage for the sake of PPC customers with wanderlust, building trust on your homepage seems like a worthwhile effort in any case.

All that said, nobody wants to build landing pages that "SUCK." Is there anything important that I've neglected to mention in the past few weeks? something that will keep users on track, and off the homepage??