One of the gold nuggets on the “This week in Google” podcast this week was that some US News sites historically had 20% of their web traffic coming in through their front door home page. 80% of their traffic arrived from links elsewhere that landed on individual articles deep inside their site. More recently, that has dropped to 10%.
If they’re anything like my site, only a small proportion of these “deep links” will come from search engine traffic (for me, search sources account for around 20% of traffic most days). Of those that do, many arrive searching for something more basic than what I have for them here. By far my most popular “accident” is my post about “Google: where did I park my car?”. This is a feature of Google Now on my Nexus 5 handset, but I guess many folks are just tapping that query into Google’s search box absolutely raw (and raw Google will be clueless – you need a handset reporting your GPS location and the fact it sensed your transition from driving to walking for this to work). My second common one is people trying to see if Tesco sell the Google Chromecast, which invariably lands on me giving a demo of Chromecast working with a Tesco Hudl tablet.
My major boosts in traffic come when someone famous spots a suitably tagged Twitter or LinkedIn article that appears topical. My biggest surge ever was when Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm”, mentioned my one page PDF that summarised his whole book on LinkedIn. The second largest when my post that congratulated Apple for the security depth in their CloudKit API, as a fresh change to the sort of shenanigans that several UK public sector data releases violate, appeared on the O’Reilly Radar blog. Outside of those two, I bump along at between 50-200 reads per day, driven primarily by my (in)ability to tag posts on social networks well enough to get flashes of attention.
10% coming through home pages though; that haunts me a bit. Is that indicative of a sea change to single, simple task completion by a mobile app? Or that content is being littered around in small, single article chunks, much like the music industry is seeing a transition from Album Compilations to Singles? I guess one example is this weeks purchase of Songza by Google – and indeed Beats by Apple – giving both companies access to curated playlists. Medium is one literary equivalent, as is Longreads. However, I can’t imagine their existence explains the delta between searches and targeted landing directly into your web site.
So, if a home page is no longer a valid thing to have, what takes it’s place? Ideas or answers on a postcard (or comment here) please!