Where Do Your Visitors Land?

It’s easy to imagine the homepage of your website as the door through which visitors enter. Almost always, that’s wrong.

If you have plenty of subpages such as categories and products, and have done even a little search engine optimization, the homepage will almost never be where the majority of your visitors land first. It’s a common misconception to picture the visitor coming to the homepage and then navigating down to the product via the menu. That’s rarely true. For example, only 13% of the traffic to this site lands on the homepage. Sure, it’s a common page to navigate to as a second step, but only in rare cases is it the first impression you get of brath.se.
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If you’ve done your SEO right, you’ll show up for a wide range of keywords, preferably several for each page. For an e-commerce site, few search phrases are as valuable as product searches—they’re often the terms that convert best. Think about your own search behavior: when you search “front chainring shimano 21,” you’re much closer to a purchase than when you search “bike,” right? Even though many more people search for “bike” than any other specific keyword, the bulk of conversions come from the massive pool of well-converting keywords that are better suited to landing pages other than the homepage.

Sure, it’s entirely possible that the homepage will rank for the most popular keywords, but even then, those big-volume terms should only account for a small slice of your total traffic. The small keywords are just so many.

What does this mean for your SEO, and how should you think when working on your pages?

In our SEO school, we go through in detail how to capture valuable traffic where it’s hard to predict the exact search terms in advance—how to optimize your products and categories to capture the visitor who is, in that very moment, looking for a specific product.