Wait, you’re telling me that your homepage is NOT your most visited page on you website?

Yeah. I know. Shocking.

I was pretty surprised when I heard it first.

It turns out that homepages are simply not as useful (for actual business transactions) as our brains think they are. Let’s take a look at an example:

What are some of the things that you see on this page?

What We Do – It’s not very often that a company has the ability to write their own company story, but you often see it in some sort of “What We Do” section. It usually contains a very concise description of the mission, vision, and values of the company. These days, it’s not uncommon to see a brief video to further hammer home this point.

Who We Are – The “About Us” page is used to humanize what is otherwise a fairly unhuman process for someone visiting a website. “About Us” pages are used to introduce visitors to the people behind the site they’re visiting and alleviate any concerns that what they’re looking at is a scam.

Careers – The quest to recruit qualified people to work to your company never sleeps. If someone is interested in joining your franchise at the corporate or even branch level, you better believe that they’re going to checking out your webpage heavily. The “careers” page is great for you to communicate what type of people thrive at your franchise and notify visitors of any openings you may have.

Contact Us – Arguably the most important tab on a homepage, the “Contact Us” link is basically a catch all. As we always say, people visit FranchiseHelp for lots of different reasons, most of which we don’t know why. You never know when a new partner is looking for you, so you want to make it straight-forward for them to get a hold of you. (Forms are better than email addresses to avoid spam!)

Think about it. See these on a lot of homepages you visit?

So this begs two questions:

1. What’s the real purpose of homepages?
2. If homepages aren’t the most visited, then what is?

Here's how we see it...

What’s the real purpose of homepages?

Homepages are most likely to be found by people who are actively seeking out your website. They may be the most popular page on your website in terms of a Google Search for the name of your company. People who are actively seeking your website are doing it for a reason. They likely have a question in the back of their head that they want answered. Some of those questions include: Who are these people? What does this company do? How do they do? Do they specialize in X? Do they have any job openings? And then if the site doesn’t has the answer to these questions, who can I ask to get the answer to this? I can’t tell you how many “contact us” forms I’ve filled out. It’s gotta be well into the hundreds.

If homepages aren’t the most visited, then what is?

Landing pages of course! Landing pages are specifically designed for a user to complete some sort of action, rather than get a question answered. In your case, it’s likely submit their contact information in a form. These pages are generally the ones that you’re going to drive all your traffic to because they are the ones that produce results. You don’t want internet voyeurs, you want franchisees. We spend lots and lots of time on landing pages because that’s where the money is made.

So the next time you visit a website, think to yourself, what’s the difference between the homepage and the other pages?

Have a question about homepages? Let us know here.