When it comes to websites, most clients want to have a beautiful looking and featureful landing page. They want all the bells and whistles, the whole shebang, anything and everything that money can buy. So much so that very little effort, if any, is put into the other pages. The general assumption is that visitors will come knocking on your front door, by typing your URL on the browser’s address field… Except that almost nobody does that…
Having An Ornately Beautiful Front Door Doesn’t Automatically Guarantee You Visitors
It’s almost human nature to want to have an attractive front door. After all, it’s only natural to assume that if the front door looks beautiful, the rest of the premises must be too. For that reason alone, many retail businesses spend a lot of time, effort and money to beautify their business frontage. Everything from display windows and front doors, to interior decorations and piped-in music. They want their retail front to be as attractive as possible, so that visitors are inclined to walk into their premises.
This actually works in the physical world. Visitors walking past the front door of any retail business premises will usually step inside if something attracts their attention. However, the same isn’t always true in cyberspace. More than 90% of visitors to any website (including random ones), actually land somewhere inside the website, and not the homepage. The remainder 10% who actually walk in through the front door are mostly website owners and/or employees, and a handful of repeat visitors.
So where do visitors actually land when they come a visiting? Well, believe it or not, they come into your premises through anywhere and everywhere except your front door. Some come knocking on your kitchen door, while others crawl in through your bedroom windows. Some even pop in from your roof, through your chimney, or even squeeze through your water drainage system too. Remember, in cyberspace, visitors don’t need to walk through your front door just to get inside your “home”. Your whole “home” is accessible directly to just about anybody with internet access and a browser.
How Do Visitors Arrive On Your Website In The First Place?
If you monitor your website’s traffic, you’d notice that almost all visitors land somewhere inside your website via links. And these links can be from search engines, social media, or links deliberately placed by others. And if you were to pay attention to the details, you’d noticed that they land on specific pages within your website. This is usually by the deliberate action of the visitors, clicking on the said links. They do that because they’re looking for specific information, which is available on that specific webpage, hence the link.
Hence, it’s a no brainer to have plenty of the contents that visitors are potentially looking for, somewhere inside your website. After all, the more interesting contents you have inside your website, the higher the chances of somebody searching for something that you have, and land somewhere inside your website.
You’re more likely to score a hit (or several hits) if you have a hundred pages of different contents. Much more likely than scoring a bullseye hit on your homepage. The probability is simply too low to have somebody to do a web search that will link them to your homepage. And to consider that the number of websites on the world wide web are increasing every single day. Not only that, each of these individual websites themselves are increasing the number of webpages, every single day. Your probability of scoring a hit simply shrinks with every passing day.
So What Can You Do About It?
Let’s face it, the main purpose of having a website is so that you can have brand exposure. You want as many visitors to your website as possible. You want to maximise interaction through your website. And for that to happen, you’ll need to attract as much visitor traffic as possible to your website. So here are some actions you can take to hitch a ride on the brand exposure mega wave.
(1) Content Creation
It’s a well established fact – the more content you have, the more likely somebody, somewhere, will land on a page, somewhere inside your website. This is simple statistics. So if you want increase your probability of getting a hit, then keep churning out articles on a regular basis.
If you regularly publish fresh articles on a timely manner, visitors will come to expect this pattern of you. This, in turn, will raise their expectation to consume more contents from you. As a result, your brand awareness will start to soar.
(2) Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
As a byproduct of publishing more pages, you’ll end up with having more anchor points to attach SEO tags to. Each webpage will be a unique page to anchor SEO tags. Just imagine, if you only have five permanent pages in your website, you’ll only have that same five pages to anchor SEO tags. But if you have a hundred pages of articles in addition to your five permanent pages, then you’ll have a whopping 105-pages to anchor your SEO tags to.
Writing 100 webpages of articles at one go is not practical, that’s a given. But you can work towards that goal by creating contents regularly. Commit to publishing an article a week, and you’d have achieved your goal of having 100 articles within two years. But that doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels then… Remember, the size of the world-wide-web grows exponentially every single day. So your choices are either to grow with the rest of cyberspace, or to start shrinking the moment you stop publishing.
(3) Exploit Your Personal Soapbox
Let’s face it, you’re the best in your business or industry. You know it, your competitors know it, and your immediate clients know it. But outside of this small circle, nobody will even know that you exist at all, let alone how good you are at doing what you do. What you need to do is to blow your own horn… Literary…
Having a blog is literary like having your personal soapbox. Maximise the usage by telling your stories here. Share what you’re good at doing, and maybe even pepper in generous amounts of testimonies from satisfied customers too. Don’t be too shy to brag. The more stories you share here, the more likely somebody will stumble onto your blog. People are always searching for something. And you’d want those who’re searching for something that you’re good at, to actually land onto your website… anywhere on it.
“But I Don’t Know How To Write Articles…”
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Every industry, every specialisation, they all have their own specialised knowledge. And it’s fair to expect that outsiders may not know enough about your industry to even comprehend it, let alone tell your stories. Hence, most people believe that only they themselves are the best at telling their specialised stories… Except that they’re not exactly good at telling stories…
The good news is that you don’t need to be an expert in that industry to be able to write stories about it. What you need is a journalist. A professional writer will be able to extract the stories out of the subject matter experts. And the most important skill that they’ll have is to write it in such a way that even the general public, without any specialised knowledge, will be able to understand your stories.
A good writer will be able to extract and write your stories to feed the general public. But a great writer will be able to do all that, and insert as many SEO tags as possible to the same published stories. The result will be that you’re more visible in search results. And this, in turn, will expose you to even more potential visitors.
“So What Should I Do About My Website?…”
First and foremost, don’t put too much emphasis on your homepage. Remember, not many visitors will come knocking on your front door. Instead, spend your limited resources intelligently by expanding the contents in your whole website.
Also practise simplicity as much as possible. In the creative industry, less is actually more. A page that’s cramped with too many design features will often cause visual fatigue. And this, in turn, will turn visitors away prematurely.
Most importantly, get it through to your head that every single webpage is a potential landing page. So you might want to spend more effort on ensuring consistency and uniformity throughout your whole website than concentrating on any single webpage, like your homepage. Keeping consistency will subtly inform the visitors that they’re still within the same website, regardless which page they may wander to.
If you’re still doubtful about being able to handle all that by yourself, or if your service provider isn’t giving you the help that you need, then please do get in touch with us… We’d love to buy you coffee, and hear you out.
