How many times should a visitor to your website have to click before they find what they came for?
This can kind of be a trick question. Obviously, in the perfect scenario, you want your customers to search for you on Google, Yahoo!, whatever and find your call to action page right away. But that’s not always the case. What if they land on your home page?
Many businesses focus nearly all their efforts, especially link building efforts, on their home page. So it’s very common for searchers to land on your home page when searching for one of your products. But if you’ve got even just 100 products, you aren’t going to be able to list them all on your home page. So how much time do you have before they decide to give up, hit the BACK button, and abandon your site? You’ve got about 3 clicks.
One Click or Less
The perfect scenario is that the searcher lands on the product/service page for which they are searching. If you’re selling many types of widgets:
- You should have separate pages for each type of widget you sell
- These pages should be clearly labeled (meta description, title tag, H1 tags) as such
- Searchers will find these pages in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc
- Searchers will click the BUY button. You’re happy.
- You ship the widget. They’re happy.
Unfortunately, what usually happens is the searchers end up on your home page. Not the best possible scenario, but still ok.
Finding the Way
Most natural links point to a website’s home page. These links, when accompanied with decent anchor text, can help your home page rank for multiple words. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Over time your site may rank for widgets, blue widgets, and maybe widget problems for example. Since the information on your blue widgets isn’t on your home page, a person landing on your home page is forced to find them. This is where your site navigation becomes important.
Site structure is a completely separate blog post, too deep to go into here. But it suffices to say that a good structure built up front will help you keep more customers on your site for a longer period of time. The quicker they can find what they came for, the better.
Into the Funnel
And as I said before, the most they should have to click before finding the blue widgets page is three times. If they have to click more than that, it’s very possible that they’ll end up heading back to the search engine and going to the next result.
Check out your website. Pick out a few products, then start at your home page and see if you can get to a call to action button in three clicks or less. Examples of a call to action would be:
- a Purchase/Buy button
- a contact form (“for more information”)
- a Click to Call button
- a Request Catalog button (not the best but at least it’s something)
If you pass that test for your products, then try this: Go to a random page on your website. Now try to get to those same products in three clicks or less. Can you still get there?
Why do this? Easy. You have limited control over what pages the searchers are going to land on. So you need to make sure your entire website is navigable within three clicks or less. You’re going to need a lot of funnels.
Fixing It
If you do these tests, and have to click four or five (or more!) times before finding what you need, there’s a real good chance you need to rethink your site structure and navigation. Before you go all gung-ho and start moving things around, you really need to be careful that you don’t do it wrong. Moving pages without telling the search engines where the pages are moved to can just kill your rankings. There are steps involved, plans to make, and redirects to build. Contact a professional that can help you keep that Google juice flowing – like me!
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