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How user friendly are your top internal entry pages?

September 21, 2007 | Internet Marketing

In the world of long-tail searches, chances are pretty good that visitors are having their initial contact on your site by landing on an internal page of your site rather than your user-friendly home page.

In the world of long-tail searches, chances are pretty good that visitors are having their initial contact on your site by landing on an internal page of your site rather than your user-friendly home page. But have you ever had a look at one of your internal pages from a “brand new visitor” perspective? Because if you did, chances are good that you might be surprised to see that you are not really giving those new visitors a very sticky experience. So try looking at one of your top internal entry pages through a new visitor’s eyes.

Okay, so we all are just a little biased when it comes to how we see our own sites, especially ones we have poured blood, sweat and tears into. And while doing an eyetracking study can be expensive, you can easily do a poor man’s version of something similar. Sit a friend, preferably one who has little knowledge of your money website, or perhaps a bit of knowledge of the market area without having been a visitor of your site previously.

But first, you need to pick which pages to test. You will need to have a look at any analytics or stats program to find out which pages are your top entry pages (meaning the pages that new visitors on your site visit first), and pick a couple of internal pages that have the highest % of entry page visitors. Then you want to pick a page with a high bounce rate. If you have two pages that each account for 20% of entry page views, but one has an 80% bounce rate while the other is only 25%, it makes sense to use the page with the 80% bounce rate, because for some reason, 80% of all people that visit that internal page will view just that one page before they leave the site. Obviously it makes the most sense for you to figure out why so many people leave after their first page view on your site! You will also want to do a quick check of the page to make sure there isn’t something obvious that is accounting for such a high bounce rate, such as a coding error breaking the page after the header or another equally obvious problem that you can attribute the high bounce rate to. Nothing is more embarassing than bleeding money from a website due to your own mistake! But also look to evaluate what you think of the page overall.

Get the full story at Jennifer Slegg’s blog

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