Roy Hunter

August 17, 2009

Florida Marketing Consultants

There are a lot of different types of web page layouts, as many as you can creatively imagine, but what are the most effective for driving conversions and being found on the internet?

I think if you ask 30 different people you will get 30 different answers.

I prefer a segmentation design approach. What is a segmentation approach you ask?

Simple.

Most businesses today are doing more than one thing. Take a piece of paper and write down all the things your business does and break them down by groups. Lets use something difficult for an example, a law firm.

Your typical law firm website will have one landing page, it is the “home” page for the site that all the traffic is driven to. This page will have information on the partners, and the scope of the services, perhaps a contact form, and that is pretty much about it.

Informative? Yes. Effective? No. What has been created by this type of page is another drop in the bucket of all the other web pages on the internet for lawyers. Makes it a little hard to compete and optimize a page for a lawyer who is really, just another lawyer.

A much more effective approach to web design and search engine optimization is segmentation of a business. Our law firm example specializes in four different fields, personal injury, divorce, litigation, and criminal defense.

Create a page for each service as if it was the only page you are going to create and optimize that page for that segment. Correlate all the pages together with one common header and footer and make those four pages your theoretical individual home page. Your default home page, the page that is reached when someone enters your URL into the address bar, should only be what I call a traffic control page. It should only be a quick introduction or flash presentation that will allow the viewer to find the other segments or categories of your business.

You say: “That is how most pages are built”, it’s not. The overall focus should be having your category pages the pages that are found in search results, not your default home page. Rather than focus your optimization efforts on a single home page, focus your efforts equally for each segment, or category page.

I have also had the experience with using separate domain names for separate categories, each page was an individual domain, the header and footer of each page was identical, the pages all linked together through that header, and if you did not pay attention to the address bar, you would swear you were on the same website. This also proved highly effective, especially when using keyword domain names.

These design considerations can prove to be very highly effective ways to optimize your business for search results. If I am searching for a divorce attorney, the page that has been optimized the best for that search term will be the page at the forefront of the search results and then all the “law firm” pages that deal with divorce and everything else will follow.

Basically, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Think of creative ways to be found on the Internet. There is a lot of competition; you need to be smarter and more creative than the rest to get the leads and sales your business needs to be profitable.

If you would like to see an example of a highly effective segmented home page, please follow the link to our website.

Florida Marketing Consultants

While you are there stop by our new marketing forum. We have a board specifically for business listings. Feel free to drop off your virtual business card there. You will get a bit of free advertising and create a one way link to your website to help with your SEO, the listing is completely free and it will remain there for the life of the forum.