The most important part of having a website is figuring out where the traffic you’re going to fight so hard for will start and end. Obviously, it’s going to start with the most authoritative landing page on your domain, your homepage. But where is the traffic going to go? Is it going to come to your website, click on three random links and then bounce? Afterall this is what the “three click rule” is telling us. For crawlers this may be completely true, but once we have traffic we aren’t concerned about the crawlers are we? The traffic coming to your site may also click three times and then bounce; however, these clicks won’t be random. These clicks are looking for something, our job is to figure out what that something is.
There is a common analogy known as the Leaky Bucket, you might remember it from a college Economics or Statistics class. Picture your homepage as a leaky bucket. Regardless of the amount of traffic you pour in traffic will pour out through the cracks. Overtime, we’ve realized that their needs to be a bunch of landing pages to allow the traffic to be captured.
We use these landing pages to increase our SEO efforts by targetting keywords with them. This can be great for SEO by constructing more content, title tags, URLs and meta description tags all including the targeted keyword. Furthermore, it serves as a landing page for internal linking, when you mention the keyword on other pages you can hyperlink the keyword and point it at the targeted landing page.
Great idea! However, at this point in time I’m not talking about SEO. As traffic hits the homepage and moves on to a landing page, the traffic is speaking to you. It’s telling you either the type of information it’s looking floor by clicking on a category, or it’s telling you the type of media it wants to learn from. We need to use this information to understand the traffic.
The main thing we forget about our Website is that they aren’t just a brochure anymore. When traffic hits the Homepage, the sales process has begun. We need to control the leaks and listen to what their telling us! We need to take advantage of ALL of the traffic we’ve earned through SEO and SEM.
–Kevin W. Elliot
Internet Marketing Ninja 