Over the past 4 or 5 years, I have worked on a number of pretty huge sites. Ocean Finance, NewsStand and obviously all Toshiba UK, IE and ND sites, to name a few. However, I’ve be pondering, especially over the past year, is the homepage of a large corporate site the most important page on the site?
The reason I bring up the topic is mostly down to the evolution of SEO, but most recently and arguably just as importantly, Social Media. I’ve been working with SEO for the past 3 years and Social Media for the past 18 months and one topic of interest keeps playing on my mind…..
Is the homepage of a site the most important page, and should you spend more resource on that page than any other?
Your probably thinking to yourself “of course it is you fool, why question it?” – and if you did say something to that effect, I’ll tell you why I am questioning it.
Recently I’ve been working on a project at Toshiba, which is currently top secrete so I wont divulge too much information, and this site is designed to be SEO and Social Media driven – purely! By that I mean that our one and only source of advertisement with me SEO and Social Media, a concept that is quite difficult to achieve for a site, especially a new site on a new domain.
As any decent Project Manager will do when starting a new project is learn from past experiences and try to make the latest project better in certain aspects compared to the last project. So, with that in mind, when I started this new project, some 8 months back, I thought to myself “right, lets do some serious statistical research on all of the Toshiba sites and try to figure out where all the referring traffic is coming from”. This may seem like a fairly standard task for any web master, and you’d be right, I look at these types of statistics every day, however I’ve never compared all sites under a corporate umbrella and gathered averages and factual statistics. For example, I look after 6 Toshiba sites – UK, IE, FI, NO, DK and SW Laptops sites – I also co-manage, with my colleague Lianne McLaughlan, the UK, IE, FI, NO, DK and SW TV and DVD sites. As well as that, we have all the micro-sites for marketing, and since my time at Toshiba I have created over 25 of these. As well as all those sites we also have promotional/competition based sites which are too small to call a micro-site, so in total I would say that I looked through about 43 statistical packages for 43 sites.
This took me about a week to accomplish……
Without boring you with all of the details, one thing kept cropping up over all of these sites – On average, over 67% of all site traffic coming to all 43 sites came from either SEO, Social Media or both…… 67%!!! Now the average Joe may well be thinking that 67% is quite low. I mean, lets take my site www.danielwheeler.co.uk for example – my referral traffic from SEO and Social Media sites is well into the 97% region, so its easy to think that 67% is quite low. However, in reality, sites like Toshiba gather a huge amount of referring traffic from other sources like News sites (non Social bases) and other online resellers, so when you take that into account 67% is actually very large.
So, my next step was to ascertain just where that traffic entered the sites and what the traffic did when it got to the site – it was this information that made me question the topic of this blog.
You see, with the introduction of Social Media to the Internet, people are spreading around links to their friends left, right and centre – which is great. With that in mind, and especially taking into account how advanced the Search Engines are these days, people aren’t being taken to the homepage of a site. They’re being taken to the source of information that is relevant to them at that time.
For example, if you go to Twitter and see a tweet about someone advertising the Satellite A500 laptop from Toshiba, that link will take you to the product page of that laptop – not the homepage, obviously. If you search into Google “Toshiba Laptop Support”, you will be taken to the Laptop Support section of the Toshiba site – not the homepage, obviously. If you go to a blog site, similar to this one, and they are reviewing a Toshiba camcorder, they will link you off to the camcorder product page – not the homepage, obviously.
You see, thanks to SEO and Social Media, users are getting to the information they want to get to and no necessarily having to rely on the homepage of a site to direct the user to the areas of the site that the company thinks will be of interest to the user. Thanks to SEO and Social Media, it kind of takes out that step in the users journey and removes any marketing errors from the company.
With that in mind, you’d probably be shocked to know what percentage of traffic the Toshiba Laptops homepage receives in comparison to the rest of the site traffic. Unfortunately, I’m not going to divulge that information, however I will say that the homepage isn’t in the top 10 most visited pages of the site – shocking isn’t it! But its not a negative thing as we want users to find the information they want to find and not have them faffing about with banners or navigation’s to get what they want.
So….. What do you think will happen to websites in 5 years time?
Honestly? I’m going to make a prediction and say that sites may not even have a single homepage in 5 years but rather have a predefined set of mini-homepages for all major key search terms for a site. Picture, if you will, walking down a hallway of doors, and each door takes you to a large section of the site. I know what you thinking, “well, isn’t that what a homepage should do and does do already” – no would be the answer. At the moment, homepages follow a universal template of homepage banners, navigation and footer links and its messy. I envisage websites changing in the structure, definitely becoming more 3-Dimensional and more lifelike.
What do you think? Is the homepage of a site the most important page, and should you spend more resource on that page than any other?
