Your Home Page is Dying!

Because of social sharing, traffic is finding alternate paths to your content and it’s only going to get harder to anticipate their entry points! Increasingly though, it’s not your home page they enter through.

So I have a couple of teenagers, and as with all teenagers your house becomes a staging point for the invasion. Invasion you say, what invasion? The invasion that is the next big social engagement of course, party, concert, gathering… what-ever Dad!

Essentially what happens is your kids, their close friends, and their not so close acquaintances, call in, stop by, hang out, and come in. They go through the doors, windows, your back yard, your side yard, your garage… you get the picture. It seems like total chaos to the untrained eye, but in reality there is a subtle hierarchy and purpose to it and all of the participants can define it for you.  It sure is different from when I was a teenager.

Todays Internet seems like the same thing, it’s always been a province of the young, it’s always seemed like it was chaos, and it’s always seemed to be understood by only a handful of its denizens. That’s not to say that you didn’t slowly begin to understand how it was trafficked.  You did get a handle on it and see how folks came and went through it, you noticed what seemed like a pattern began to develop, but just when you felt like you had it nailed down, it changed up and went another way. Well guess what? I am here to tell you it’s changed, yet again!

Enter Social Media and content marketing.

First a little bit of history with regard to visitors.  Front pages of sites were where polite people went for more info on your company’s product or service. Queuing up to come in, find more info and leave after visiting 2 or 3 pages. Your site was neatly organized for this, pages were arranged by use and need and you could anticipate paths and drop off/out points and adjust for them.

That’s not the case any more, as a whole, front page viewership has declined by 25% to 50%, the news paper and portal industries have seen it decline by up to 40% and service industries like legal, accounting, investment have seen their front-page viewership decline by up to 20%. All that social sharing of content is at the heart of this and because of it a new rule of thumb has taken over; the greater number of visitors to your site, the smaller the percentage will be through your front-page i.e.: a site with 25,000 unique monthly visitors will have only 25% of them come in through the front page.

Why is this happening? Like I said before it’s due to social media and content marketing, all of your friends shared posts, their email disto of content, their texts of the same, and your Google searches — all of these take visitors deep into sites, and its called sideways surfing. It’s not a new concept but one that seems to be increasing since the behavior was first noticed over 3 years ago.  Don’t get me wrong, your front page is still important, it typically is the most visited page on your site so it still needs attention. You do however need to change some of your tactics:

1. Your sites content should brand you, that means easier to read reviews and ratings pages, richer bio content, more and better case studies, better articles and blog posts. Content pages are what people are sharing and landing on, so you need to put your best foot forward.
2. Get rid of the one hit wonders, make sure that your site has multiple articles on popular subjects, the categories that show high viewership need to be curated and more variations developed on them, and make sure those variations are displayed to visitors to click on the right rail.

So it’s an interesting problem, you want visitors to your site and you want them to come in any way they want. That means they’re coming to your site in unconventional ways and if not engaged they leave. If your content backs up your brand and if there is a lot of it to consume you’ll be able to hold onto them and that way you can hopefully influence them more and turn them into brand champions.

Oh, and as for the teenagers in my house? I want them to be there, I want them to find what they’re looking for, and that way I can hopefully head off any poor choices and influence the outcome… I love content marketing.

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