7.3.1 | Blogs

March 18, 2006 | Follow-up: Every page a homepage

By John Girard
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A couple of months ago, I wrote about making every page on your website a home page, due to the increasing number of visits that come from search engines linking "deep" into content pages on your site.

One of the most effective tools in crafting such a strategy is providing a list of the site's most popular content in the page navigation.  This makes intuitive sense -- once someone is done reading a page on your site, an obvious decision looms: what to do next?  If you provide a compelling answer to that question, your user will take you up on it.  And if the answer to that question involves clicking to more content on your site, you're helping your business at the same time as you help your reader.

One of Clickability's Interactivity customers recently ran a controlled test over a 3-month period to try to understand what impact adding our Most Popular tool to the site would have.  They focused the test on users who deep-linked into the site from search engines.  The question: how many more pages views, on average, could they expect to get by providing users with a logical next step (in the form of the Most Popular list) after reading the article in question?

The results were startling: average page views by readers coming from search engines improved by 30% during the test period, and the addition of the Most Popular tool was the only variable that was adjusted during the test.

With as many as 1/2 of all readers of content sites coming from search engines these days (and assuming that readers who start at the homepage and readers who start from a content page have roughly the same average views per visit), this means that this simple tool can move total site traffic by as much as 15%.

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