I want to address a common misconception about a website’s home page as the most important landing page (the first page the visitor sees) and how, to the contrary, having in-depth content is important for Google search website traffic. Often there is confusion and thought that the home page of a given website is the most important page and thus time and money spent improving this page will give the greatest return, but this is often not the case.
See graphic below from one of our clients which shows a pie chart with the breakdown of which pages were the ‘landing page’ when a visitor first came to the site. You can see from the graph below that:
- 22% of all visitors landed on the home page(blue segment in the graph)
- 78% of the traffic came into the website through another page
- 62.63% of the traffic landed on a page not in the top 10 of rankings for pages visited(grey segment in the pie chart)
This means the visitor most likely came in through a search engine or another website refer all that had a link to a page other than the homepage.
The common misconception here is that most visitors will come in through the front page. This is far from the truth with a website with deep content and lots of pages that are keyword targeted. In fact, if you see that the majority of your traffic is landing on the home page that is probably a signal that you need much more in-depth content pages.
Especially with the vast majority of searchers using the Google search engine these days, the more quality, keyword-targeted content you have, the more landing pages that will be indexed by Google and the more potential search terms a visitor can find you with!