Visitor does not land on the homepage

“Why is my homepage getting so few visitors?”

It’s easy to imagine that a site visitor comes in through the homepage and from there navigates to the product they’re looking for. That makes us think of a site as a flow. Sometimes it does work that way, but in most cases on a well search-engine-optimized site, the visitor lands directly on the product page or the category page, if such pages exist. Not only is that the most common pattern, it’s also preferable.

If you’re looking for a specific cable for an iPhone, you would naturally prefer to land at least on the iPhone or cable category if it isn’t possible to go straight to the exact cable you want. It would be much worse to arrive at a generic electronics store homepage where you have to start searching again. Because searchers give a site so little time—mere seconds—before they move on, it’s important that the site quickly and clearly communicates: the thing you’re looking for, we have it. A product page answers a search query for a specific cable far better.

For a bike shop, a reasonable distribution would look like this

This isn’t just sensible for the visitor—Google fully agrees with this approach. It’s next to impossible to drive all of this traffic to a single landing page. It’s much easier to maintain a good position in the search results with a page that’s specifically about “Scott Spark 900 SL” for that query than with a page that’s about bikes in general.

This has several implications. It means your navigation is only in exceptional cases the most important thing for the visitor. It’s better if they arrive at the right place directly. Navigation is of course important too, but in many cases it’s more about helping Google categorize pages so Google can then send the visitor to the right spot.

It also means you essentially have just one page to show the visitor what you offer and why you’re the best option. We need to think of every page on the site as a landing page—pages where visitors arrive after making a specific search. In a moment we’ll dive into how to design a landing page so that it performs well.

Consider this

Take a moment to think about how a visitor who comes directly to a product or subpage on your site is greeted. Someone who searched for “Scott mountain bikes” and landed on the category page. Does the page answer the question that was asked—are you showing exactly the bikes that were requested?

Another important question to ask is what else is being shown. Remember that the person who searched isn’t interested in bikes in general, but specifically in Scott’s mountain bikes. Is your large navigation with all the other brands relevant? Would it perhaps be better to show accessories for Scott—or even something else entirely, like cycling shorts or helmets that they could actually use with their Scott?