Your Homepage Visitors are Heading for the Exits.

Whether they were brought to the wrong page or it’s due to poor content, your homepage visitors are not finding what they’re looking for.

Here is something you may not know about your homepage. It is not your welcome mat anymore.

By this, I mean your homepage is no longer the sole gateway for visitors entering your website.

That is good news since most (80 – 90%) of your organic search visitors are looking for something they cannot find on your homepage.

And thanks to Google’s powerful RankBrain engine that accurately determines user intent from a search query, your visitors are likely landing exactly where they need to be.

That is if your website structure is in line with new standards.

If not, this article is for you. It focuses on the three fundamental design shifts required for your homepage and other pages within your site to leverage Google’s RankBrain engine and capture pre-qualified traffic at the right places on your website.

As search engines have evolved, they have become better at understanding user intent when a user enters a search query.

Search engines use this user intent to match them with the most relevant pages within a website.

However, if your website is still structured for the old homepage-first paradigm, Google may find it difficult to determine the page on your website most relevant to each search query. The result is that visitors are sent instead to your homepage*, other less-relevant pages, or worse, — a competing website.

*More than 80% of the visitors to your homepage, according to Analytics data of small winery websites, will leave within 30 seconds without venturing further into the website.

But there is good news. If your site content is ordered according to new standards, you will benefit from Google delivering pre-qualified traffic directly to the pages on your site that specifically answer their questions according to their user intent.

The resulting benefits to your winery include longer engagement times on your site and higher conversion rates.

The Inherent Shortcomings of the Homepage

Before we cover specific design considerations for harnessing Google’s power to discern user intent, we need to understand why the homepage creates a problem for us.

The big drawback of your homepage is the difficulty of knowing why your visitors are there.

Did they search for you by your winery name? Did they enter a search query containing one of the grape varieties you work with? Did they use the keyword tasting rooms, but your Visit Us page is not well-optimized for that term?

Considering these possibilities, we become aware we cannot confidently present the content best suited to each user intent.

So, we try to solve this shortcoming with our site navigation, which presents other challenges.

Open this panel for a quick description of the challenges we face with homepage navigation >

Digging Deeper:

The Challenges of Homepage Navigation

Homepage navigation is not often given much ongoing thought. We set it up, and we expect that it works fine.

Let's take another look.

Here's the set-up:

A user on your homepage looks at the link labeled Acquire.

They were hoping to find out about your wines before possibly buying something to try.

Is Acquire where they can learn about your wines? Or perhaps it's where folks can schedule a visit and then get some wine? Or maybe this is the point where your user will be told to wait on an allocation list.

Ten seconds have passed.

Your homepage visitor hasn't yet found what they were looking for.

What will be their next action? you wonder.

Poof!

They will demonstrate the supporting principle of the golden rule of usability design — Don't make me think — and vanish from your site.

Acquire might seem to support your brand attributes of exclusivity and scarcity, but it may not align well with online behavior.

Shop or Purchase are more clearly identified with user expectations, but perhaps they offend the sensibilities of your brand.

The Golden Rule of Online Usability Standards Don't make me think, reminds us that we cannot expect our users to hunt for what they expect to see right in front of their eyes.

Your users need to see what they're looking for, and if they don't see it, they'll leave.

A large portion of search traffic lands on internal pages rather than homepages, as users are looking for specific information or products rather than the general overview provided by a homepage.

Search Engine Journal

Taking Advantage of Google’s Knack for User Intent

Google’s massively powerful machine learning system, RankBrain, uses historical data and contextual understanding to analyze search queries and determine user intent.

Not too familiar with the concept of User Intent? Open this panel for a quick breakdown >

We can leverage the insights from Google’s RankBrain engine by modifying our website content and structure for better alignment with user intent.

There are three fundamental design shifts to make.

Digging Deeper:

The 4 Types of User Intent

User Intent generally falls into one of four categories:

Navigational Searches
When users search for a specific website or brand like "Buena Vista Winery."

Informational Searches
When users search for an answer to a question like "How to age wines?"

Commercial Searches
Someone seeks information about products or services like "best Pinots under $20" or "tasting rooms pouring Pinot Noir>"

Transactional Searches
When users intend to complete a transaction, such as "buy Opus One Cabernet."

Three Fundamental Design Shifts Required to Keep Your Visitors

1. Page content must be narrowly topic-specific.

Each page on your site should narrowly cover a single topic in depth. It should be clear to your site’s visitors and the search engines what each page is about.

As an example, homepages tend to be very light on text. If a significant proportion of that text is devoted to a description of your tasting room, you risk having your Commercial search traffic delivered to your homepage instead of your Visit Us page.

You might think that your website requires no improvement in this area, but a look at your Google Search Console data might show that your homepage is indeed ranking higher for tasting room-related search queries than your Visit Us page.

2. Your homepage cannot be all things to all people.

Although it is more difficult to know why a user is on your homepage than on any other page on your site, avoid trying to appeal to all people. Define a single goal for your homepage and focus on making that happen.

What Your Homepage Does Well

Your homepage is ideal for receiving the users who search for you by your winery name or who search for wineries that match a particular criterion: Moon Mountain Wineries.

These folks are generally unfamiliar with you, so they are arriving at your site unqualified. Give these people the one thing they need to know about your winery (whether visually or with text elements — as long as it’s a quick take) then, move them along.

3. Your homepage must quickly funnel users away from the homepage.

It only takes a few seconds for someone to take in the spectacular vistas featured on your homepage and get a sense of who you are. After that, they need direction, and quickly.

Waiting for your homepage visitors to notice you have a navigation bar will be too late. And a set of 14 navigational options to choose from is too many. Place just a few choices directly within their focal point: Buy Wine, Book a Tasting, and What We Make, for example, is a painless array most people can handle.

Google Search Console provides a wealth of information about your website’s search traffic and performance. It’s essential for identifying and resolving issues that can impact your SEO.

Danny Sullivan

Public Liaison for Search, Google

Bradley Squires

ENGAGEMENT CATALYST

Bradley Squires, the founder of Wine Chemistry Creative, helps wineries become memorable. He thinks of this as creating chemistry with your customers and future customers. Bradley has provided marketing services for some of the largest (and smallest) brands in the U.S.. Notable brands include Vintrace, UCSF, Ericcson, Grgich Hills, The Nature Conservancy, and Napa Valley Vintners. He holds degrees in Oenology, Viticulture, and Wine Marketing. He doesn’t have a dog.

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