Posted by "You don’t control your homepage. Google does."
If you expect to show up to one of Avinash Kaushik‘s presentations and not hear something provocative that you have never heard before, you’ve got another thing coming.
As closing keynote at this year’s InfoPresse Web Analytics Day, Kaushik – Analytics Evangelist at Google, Blogger at Occam’s Razor, Author of Web Analytics – An Hour A Day, and Six Pixels of Separation friend (we had a great 25-person Geek Dinner Montreal last night with Avinash) uses beautiful slides and eloquent language to encourage Marketers to think differently (and strategically) about the new Digital Marketing realities. And over 350 Marketers were on hand to pay witness.
Cutting through the crap and quagmire of useless Web Analytics in lieu of actionable insights has led Kaushik to really analyze the state of traffic, and what drives conversion online. Consumers finding your content, primarily through a Google search box, that drops them somewhere in the middle of a big and bloated website is only going to do one thing, and Avinash describes their experience best: "they come, they puke, they leave."
The premise is simple: every page of your Website must now be considered a homepage. The hours spent tinkering on your current homepage needs to shift into ensuring that every page is a brilliant representation for the keywords and external links that drove someone to your site. Fewer and fewer consumers are coming in via the homepage. They could also care less about what your company does or the other products you sell. They were searching for something specific, and if it’s not there after they’ve clicked on a search result link, they’re you’re roadkill on the information super highway.
Treating every page like a homepage seems like a simple tactic.
The truth is that it is a simple idea and a simple tactic, but it’s also very hard to get right – and so few Marketers are even thinking like this in the first place. The big win is to use Web Analytics to drive insights, focus and results. It’s nice to think about the fun we can have with online social networks, but let’s not ever forget about how measurable and actionable the Digital Marketing channel really is.
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Old-school thinking about the home page is still a major roadblock for web marketers who are trying to build a best practice site.
It sounds cynical, but the old strategy of abandoning the home page — i.e. letting the managers argue about it and tinker endlessly, while you focus on making critical changes everywhere else — still has some value.
Sometimes it is the obvious that is overlooked. Everyone knows that search engines drop visitors everywhere but our home page, yet as marketers we choose to ignore this fact and hope for the best.
Thanks for the reminder Avinash.
“Every page is your home page” is an excellent strategy. But don’t forget why that has now come about.
If search engines can take you directly to a tertiary page, they can also take you to a secondary page.
Do your visitors really need you to direct them to every page on your site from your home pages? No. Think like the (search engine powered) user. Think Amazon. Recommendations. Relevance.