In the past, the prevailing wisdom with regard to website design was to build sites with numerous subsidiary pages in order to best describe your business to the general public. In many cases this meant sites that contained ten to twenty or more pages, each of which described a facet of the business. The thought was that people would come to the homepage and then wander through the site to glean the information necessary to make a decision as to whether the business best served their needs.
That was then and this is now.
Today, people searching the web have neither the time nor the inclination to spend ten minutes or more to search a website. They want the information and they want it NOW! What this means to the average website owner is that like it or not, you have less than two minutes to make your point, set the bait and reel in the fish. Far from being inclined to spend fifteen minutes sniffing around your site, few prospects will even scroll below the fold on your homepage, let alone click around your site. So you need to keep this in mind if you want to convert clicks into cash.
Take a hard look at your website. When someone clicks onto your homepage, what kind of an experience are you providing front and center? Are you still wasting valuable real estate by cramming a group of meaningless graphics atop the page? Or have you evolved your web presence by shooting a 60-90 second elevator pitch video that introduces you to your audience? Do you have a clearly defined and highly visible offer or call to action? Is your phone number easy to locate? If the answer to any of the above is “no” then you need to consider putting your homepage on a weight loss regimen.
What Does a Search Engine Mean To You?
When I look at a search engine I regard it as a kind of oracle. Ask a question and you will be provided with an answer. That being said, if you are optimizing your website for the search engines, you will want to create subsidiary landing pages for every major keyphrase you wish to target. For instance, if your business involves irrigation, such as the sample below of Kenny Hunt’s Jacksonville-Irrigation.com, you probably want to optimize the homepage for Jacksonville Irrigation. This way when a prospect keys in Jacksonville Irrigation, the link to your website and/or video will pop up on Google and once clicked, your link will take the prospect to the landing page that is specifically geared towards irrigation.
However, Kenny also does landscaping and sod replacement. Therefore we created two more landing pages, sod-jacksonville.com and landscaping-jacksonville.com where the video, text, and offer correspond to Sod Replacement and Landscaping. The reason we did this was so that anyone searching for Jacksonville sod replacement or landscaping would be directed right to the horses mouth without having to search for and click onto any subsidiary links. (using the question and answer school of search engine thought)
This equation applies equally well whether you are purveying Air Conditioning Repair or Zuni artifacts. Plus it will go a long way toward eliminatng unsightly website bloat. That doesn’t mean that you should scrimp on content by any means. In fact, far from it. That’s why blogs were invented.
So if you are looking to create a lean, mean, lead producing machine, put your website on a diet today. Your wallet will thank you.
Carl Weiss is president of Access-JAX, an online marketing company that specializes in turning overgrown websites into lead generating, cash register ringing machines. If you are interested in a Free Web Presence Analysis that will show you where you stand online, call Access-JAX at (904) 234-6007, or email carlw@datasync.com.
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