I suppose the reason for this is that people think of their site in terms of being like a physical shop.  Shops need to have a great store front to attract customers inside.  So it follows that you should take the same approach with your site, right?

Right – except that with your website, your store front is probably not your home page. It probably won’t be the first thing your visitors see.  Many of your visitors may never see it at all. So if you’re spending most of your time looking at it, and thinking about how to improve it, you could be missing out on a lot of potential enquiries.

So which page should be your all-important ’store front’?

It depends.  Visitors should be coming to your site from lots of different sources, and which page they see first, along with what it should contain, varies.

For example, if you are sending Pay Per Click (PPC) visitors to your home page, you are throwing money away. Stop now.  Always point your PPC campaigns at specific, focussed landing pages that direct the visitor towards taking a single action, for example giving you their email address, or buying something.  So, for PPC, the landing page is the most important.

A Google search visitor could end up at a post in your blog or a product detail page, depending on what their query was.  What you should show depends on their query.  Whether that single page meets their needs makes the difference between them turning into a paying customer, or clicking the ‘back’ button, never to be seen again.

Whereas for somebody who picks up your business card at networking event, who  wants to get a feel for what sort of business you are, it probably is the home page.  Or it could be the sign-up page for a free item of value (such as a free marketing audit), because you have the link on the back of your card.

It could be any page!

In truth, almost any page of your site could end up being the “home” page for a particular visitor.  For each page on your site, you really need a clear idea where the visitors to that page come from, what they are looking for, and what actions you want them to take. You then need to measure and test whether or not they’re actually doing as you expect (they probably won’t be).

This can seem a pretty daunting task, especially if you have an established site with a lot of content.  So start with your 10 most popular pages, and ask yourself:

• What purpose do they serve for you, and your visitors?
• If they are product pages, are people buying?
• Is this the only page they visit, or do they move deeper into the site?
• If they are information pages, are visitors signing up to your newsletter for more of the same?
• If they are blog pages, are people spending time reading them, then subscribing to your RSS feed?
• Are the most popular ones, the pages that bring the most value to you (in terms of actions that you want your visitors to take)?

If you’re not happy with the answers, it’s time to stop looking at your home page for a while and focus on the rest of your site.