Doug LenosI raised this question during my OMS presentation in San Diego recently. The premise is this: with the advent of search engines, the ‘overall value’ of the home page to a corporate website has lessened. Traditionally, a visitor’s first exposure to a company is its home page, working down into the site to uncover the information they’re seeking. However, the maturation of search engine technology has changed that.

Rather than a top-down pyramid model to presenting content, the search engines ’see’  web content in a more horizontal, flat view. As a web strategist I strive to construct my clients web sites to land their visitors from search engines directly on the product or service page that best matches the term(s) they are looking for. Why would you want take them to the home page and require them to figure out from there, how to get to the right product or service page they seek?

Even the best-constructed home page would still require the visitor to determine the ‘best’ next link to click or enter the same search term in the sites search box. An even greater danger would be if they click a link on the homepage and it requires subsequent choices to find their content or is the wrong choice altogether. Remember, Google is only one click away.

The argument(s) against this approach that I heard range from, “the visitor won’t know anything about the company” to “they will be lost if you drop them in the middle of our website”. Really? If that is the case then you have a content issue within your site. In the decision making process, particularly if one is info gathering / researching, they want to know if the site has answers to their problem first, and credibility second. Knowing more about the company, where they are located, how long they are in business, how financially stable are they (btw- I am primarily referring to large ticket items and/or B2B relationships like service contracts) all factor in but are secondary to the primary concern of the visitor - Can the company solve my need/problem?  Nothing else matters if the answer is no - and if the answer is yes and you never get a chance to show them how, then you will likely lose them as well. The first impression matters - within 6-8 seconds the visitor will determine if they are going back to the SERPS or staying with your site.

I somewhat agree with Jill Whalen’s comments on the Internet Marketing Report blog. In response to my assertion that the home page is losing relevance, she commented, “Search engines are still giving home pages a ton of weight since it does tend to be the one most linked to by the outside world. Home pages are the best place to target those general, competitive keyword phrases that provide an overall look at what your business as a whole offers.

It’s highly unlikely that your specific inner product pages will be able to target those types of phrases very well. That said, you most definitely *also* want to optimize your inner product pages for their specific keyword phrases – not necessarily for longtail phrases, but for somewhat competitive phrases that are highly relevant to what you’re offering.”.

Well, the proof is in the data. Six months after we released the Cintas.com site - whose IA was based on driving traffic straight to highly conversion-optimized product pages - the web analytic data shows that the page rankings for most all of the product/service main pages are on page 1 of Google - ahead of the home page - and the site is converting leads at a 400% increase over the previous 6 months.

To see for yourself, Google ‘document shredding’ - that has been a home run and resulted in a huge lift in search traffic and business leads for the document management team. As of Thanksgiving morning (yes I am actually writing this on Thanksgiving morning) not only is Cintas ranked #1 for document shredding but they have their Document Management page first and their shredding page ranking at #2 as shown below.

Google SERP for ‘document shredding” - Nov 27, 2008

Document Shredding and Document Storage Services - Cintas
3 visits - Nov 11
Minimize your risk of identity theft, government fines and lawsuits by setting up valuable document shredding, document storage and product destruction …
www.cintas.com/DocumentManagement/ - 17k

Document Shredding Services - Cintas
 2 visits - Nov 8
Cintas Document Shredding programs are an efficient alternative to in-house document shredding.
www.cintas.com/DocumentManagement/DocumentShredding.aspx - 21k
 

I will write more on how we pulled this off on the redesigned Cintas.com web site in coming days. There is more work to do but the site is a lead gen machine that has paid back Cintas’ investment in the new design several fold in just a couple months after its’ launch. As of October ‘08 the measured ROI for Cintas.com stood at 22. For every dollar Cintas invests on their web site, they had a return of $22.

And after all isn’t that the goal?