Author: Jeff Larche

With a background that includes direct marketing and customer relationship management (CRM), Jeff Larche brings an unusual approach to his work. What these other two disciplines have in common is database marketing, and they continue to strongly influence his work as marketing technology leader.
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What if the contents of your home page was ultimately controlled by Google?

I’ve noticed that the growing power of search engines has brought about a new way to look at the design of a commercial web site. The old approach was to design a site starting with the Home Page. That was the presumed entry page — at least much of the time.

Paradoxically, the new paradigm suggests we should design our sites with pages beyond our direct control in mind. 

Today I’ll focus on the entry pages to your site that a very important set of prospects uses. I’m talking about search engine results pages (SERPs) on important search engines, for specific, relevant search terms.

You know what you want to say on your home page. But what about what is said on a search results page? If you consider that you will be getting 10% to 15% of your total site traffic from search engines (a norm we’ve witnessed with many of our commercial sites), can you afford to ignore the influence that these SERPs have on consumers who click through to you? Or worse, the influence they have to cause other prospects not to click through?

I suggest we all regularly check to see what descriptions are showing up for our sites on important SERPs. What’s more, consider setting up a way to find correlations between the best descriptions in these organic listings and those consumers’ chances of converting from visitors to customers. It can be done, and could yield better ROI from those visits. Remember, these folks are pre-qualified and are often your very best prospects!

By the way, I’m talking here exclusively about “organic” results — the results that are generated by a search engine’s true search algorithms. Much has been written elsewhere about testing and tweaking text listings for pay-for-click ads. My point is, why not apply this same discipline to refining your organic results descriptions?

You may even eventually want to optimize key pages that are most likely to be visited from these organic search click-throughs, to ensure that was is stated on the SERPs’ descriptions is restated on that landing page. It could be the difference between a new, satisfied customer and a frustrated, departing visitor.

Speaking of not frustrating your site visitors, my plan is to follow this post with one about the easiest and most sure-fire way to improve your site’s navigation. Stay tuned.