22-01-13
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 | Forum devotee | | Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: Brisbane
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The info here is worth it's weight in gold.
Unfortunately because it's "free", the intrinsic value won't be appreciated as much.
Marketing is all about entering the conversation taking place in the minds of your target market and your website will reflect if you are doing a good job or not.
John's post should be a sticky imo because too many "marketers" get lost with the media ( seo in this case) and are unaware of what the target market wants.
The result is no leads at best and worst case scenario, a ton of low quality leads.
Johnw, consider repackaging it into an article and hopefully the smart folks at FS will publish it. This is one of those "needle in a haystack" posts that's worth more than a 100 posts. Combined. Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnW  Hi John,
For an SEOed website, most people don't visit the Home page to see what it is about, IMHO.
With few exceptions, they should land on the page that best answered their information search question or the relevant internal page linked from some external hard link. From there they may go to an "About" page, "Contact" page, "Portfolio" page, an alternative product page or to a page with more detailed info, but why would they need to go to Home?
An SEOed site should anticipate visitors info needs and be able to provide it and subsequent info needs in about 3 page link clicks. People are too busy to waste their time looking at info that is important to the site owner. Give them relevant answers fast, obviously and with an incentive to act NOW!
For a business with a range of products or services, I find the Home page is best thought of as a store directory board with the company name, its business category and its USP featured large. People don't hang around Home pages, they mostly use them to see where they can find the detailed info they need on the site. If it's not obvious, their BACK BUTTON certainly is and you have 0.2 of a second to arrest the automatic back button grab!
There are a bunch of variables that impact this. The 2 biggies are: - The effectiveness of the site's SEO
- Size of the site
Effective SEO looks at people's search methods. These may include: - Business category searches
- Product/service category searches
- Problem searches
- Solution searches
- Location search words
- A small number will use company/brand name searches.
I suggest it is impossible to define a business where there are not thousands of information search variables based on the above methods.
No single page can target all these search methods. A home page may target a business name, a business category and location. It cannot possible rank well for all the variables. Crude Rule of Thumb: If you have a 50 page website and as much as 20% of visitors landing on the site's Home page, I would be looking for what is wrong with its SEO or where there are SEO opportunities being missed.
Regs,
JohnW | |
