Homepage – Could Rank Lower on Your Priorities
On the site I manage right now, the home page ranks in 5th place. Is that a surprise? It shouldn’t be. Most site owners know that internally everyone wants a piece of the homepage but further analysis may determine that your home page is not as important as people think. I keep telling people that the home page is not that important but no one seems to believe me.
Going to the home page is reflecting the behaviour of the marketers or other people in your organization who may have it bookmarked it or type in the URL directly. To them, it is as if having a banner or promotion on the home page is the same as having a big sign at the front of the store, where all of the customers enter. However, on the web, users can enter from a wide variety of back and side doors – through Google or Live searches, campaign pages or RSS links from other sites for example. So, as you prioritize your development, you should consider how the users are flowing through the site.
How to Put your Homepage into Perspective
Look at your web analytics reports (Omniture, Webtrends, Google Analytics etc) and see where the homepage ranks. You can also check your entry pages. As I said before, right now on the content-site I work on, the homepage is in 5th place behind campaign pages and some articles that rank well on the search engines. This means that more emphasis will be placed on linking from those pages, without being a distraction. On the online job board where I used to work, the home page ranked far behind the search screen and the results screen, so the best cross-promotion opportunities were there.
That being said, if your top page is a campaign page, you may not want to link off of it since it will likely hurt conversions. One good way to cross-promote is to put a dramatic splash about another campaign on the thank-you page. Of course, after you are done with the analysis and the implementation, wash, rinse, repeat – it is time to analyse again! See what the referring pages are to your desired destination pages to see if your promotion was successful.
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