In working with clients on their websites over the years it’s become apparent that most people put an emphasis on the homepage of their website. I do to. The homepage is an important piece of your online marketing puzzle. It’s a place to engage users and give a distilled, powerful introduction to your brand. The homepage is considered to be the most important landing page of the whole website.

We may need to change our thinking.

The fact is that people will find your site in a variety of ways—many of those ways will not take them to your homepage. If your implementing an SEO strategy at all, you’ll be deep linking to all kinds of pages within your site structure, not just the homepage. You’re most likely getting lots of articles and pages from your site ranked high for long-tail keywords as well.

What’s the point?

Not everyone will be going to your homepage. In fact, the net traffic to sub-pages and blog posts is usually far greater than homepage traffic.

So what is the solution?

More often than not, interior pages are simply a “dumping ground” for content. A simple template is produced and marketers or website managers throw content into the “shell”. It’s time we become more on purpose with the foundation of our websites.

In my view, we need to approach website design from the inside out. Start with designing the interior pages and optimize them for conversion—first. Make sure that we are putting the necessary thought into each interaction. We need to think about the users that are accessing our content from different sources and providing interactions that help them engage with our companies more easily. Once we have successfully designed the “foundation” pages we can then start to design specific landing pages and then finally the homepage.

This is the exact opposite way that most websites are built. I think that adopting this method will create more effective websites that generate more conversions and revenue. And that’s always a welcome change!

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