Website Entry Pages by Maintained Website Services
I was sitting in on a company’s marketing meeting recently. The head of IT was laying out a very pretty picture of how visitors would be experiencing the newly updated website. They had spent a lot of energy on creating a good experience for the buying public. He talked about how people would be able to find what they wanted by selecting options as they moved through the site.
The problem was that they had not made much preparation for a visitor who entered the website some place other than the home page. This was the place where the options started from and you were already selecting options when you moved deeper into their information.
So why is this a problem you ask? Wouldn’t someone find a website by entering at the home page? The answer is, not always. It has to do with how the visitor found the website and how you have laid out your information.
Successful websites are optimizing their pages for Search Engine results. In doing this, different pages are optimized for different search terms. Pages at our main website (http://www.myklin.com/) get visitors using very different search terms such as, “maintained website services, pictures on candles, Native American wall art, and fingernail decals.” There are others as well that direct people to our information.
Each specific page has information optimized towards a specific search term that the visitor is looking for. Because of this, each page has become an entry page. Many people never see our home page but they do get a chance to select which product they want on every page. Plus, I can use the higher traffic pages to encourage them to look at other goods and services.
You can argue that the self-selection process started away from our website but if you don’t allow the visitor to continue to make a full range of choices they will stay visitors and not become customers. You ignore the opportunity to cross-sell and that is under utilizing the website’s potential.
Finding new customers is the expensive part of the process. Existing customers are usually easier to make new sales to assuming you gave them a good experience the first time. To make a visitor into a customer you must engage them in a conversation and let them find what they want to see in the easiest possible way. Making it difficult for them to make choices is a good way to make them leave.
Mike Myklin is an author, a lecturer, and an e-commerce owner specializing in Internet Marketing. If you have questions about the Internet and e-commerce, you can send them to him and he will try to answer them in his column. You can also get information on-line at http://www.myklin.com/.
The problem was that they had not made much preparation for a visitor who entered the website some place other than the home page. This was the place where the options started from and you were already selecting options when you moved deeper into their information.
So why is this a problem you ask? Wouldn’t someone find a website by entering at the home page? The answer is, not always. It has to do with how the visitor found the website and how you have laid out your information.
Successful websites are optimizing their pages for Search Engine results. In doing this, different pages are optimized for different search terms. Pages at our main website (http://www.myklin.com/) get visitors using very different search terms such as, “maintained website services, pictures on candles, Native American wall art, and fingernail decals.” There are others as well that direct people to our information.
Each specific page has information optimized towards a specific search term that the visitor is looking for. Because of this, each page has become an entry page. Many people never see our home page but they do get a chance to select which product they want on every page. Plus, I can use the higher traffic pages to encourage them to look at other goods and services.
You can argue that the self-selection process started away from our website but if you don’t allow the visitor to continue to make a full range of choices they will stay visitors and not become customers. You ignore the opportunity to cross-sell and that is under utilizing the website’s potential.
Finding new customers is the expensive part of the process. Existing customers are usually easier to make new sales to assuming you gave them a good experience the first time. To make a visitor into a customer you must engage them in a conversation and let them find what they want to see in the easiest possible way. Making it difficult for them to make choices is a good way to make them leave.
Mike Myklin is an author, a lecturer, and an e-commerce owner specializing in Internet Marketing. If you have questions about the Internet and e-commerce, you can send them to him and he will try to answer them in his column. You can also get information on-line at http://www.myklin.com/.
posted by Mike Myklin at 3:36 AM
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