One of the big “a-ha” moments many of our SEO clients experience occurs when we talk about how websites, serving as virtual stores, differ from their brick and mortar cousins.

The simplest and most basic difference comes from the fact that brick and mortar stores generally have one “official” entrance while websites, through the virtue of search engine indexation, can be “entered” at almost any point.

Say a searcher is looking for, let’s just go out on a limb here, “sour cream”. (Known here in the UK as “soured cream” – a fact I recently discovered.)

In the online world, a searcher would simply type the query into Google for example, and Voila!, millions of web pages (4.08 MM to be exact)  having something to do with “sour cream” would show up.

In the “real world”, however, the pattern is different. A shopper would generally enter through a store’s main entrance and begin the “search”. In my case it was Tesco, here in Swansea last Sunday, when I was shopping for “sour cream” (we were craving chicken fajitas).

With brick and mortar stores, people are familiar with the concept of browsing, knowing that while most stores have a similar organizational pattern (e.g. products requiring refrigeration are generally located together, as are breads, vegetables, wine), it can still take a while to “learn” that organization when one is a new shopper at that store.

For example, my “sour cream” experience at Tesco on Sunday took more than 45 minutes. At first I browsed for the “soured cream” myself, then I asked for help from an employee who took me to the “salad cream” section (salad cream appears to be a mild mayonnaise people put on their salads), then I browsed some more on my own, then I asked another employee who helpfully said it was in the “milk” section. Once there (again), I frantically examined each shelf on the “milk” aisle until I found the sour cream. All this took place whilst also hearing the countdown to the store closing time and fearing our chicken fajitas would not, in fact, include the critical ingredient.

In short, there’s an element of patience and perusal associated with brick and mortar shopping – until, that is, you learn exactly where the sour cream is and can make a beeline for that aisle the next time you need it.

Online shoppers are not that patient.

The Focused Online Shopper

According to a 2007 study sponsored by SLI Systems, more than 70% of online shoppers will abandon an e-commerce site within 1-2 minutes if they can’t locate the products they’re looking for.

And shoppers often don’t start at the home page and work their way through the site. Instead, they find and enter a site through any one of multiple entry points by using search engines as their method of navigation – and they do this more than 43% of the time (Source: “The User Revolution”, Piper Jaffray, 2007).

Which means all that time and energy spent on creating the “perfect” home page and studying searchers behavior, clicks and progress after users land on the home page, can be wasted if users never see the home page in the first place.

Caveat: This is certainly NOT to say that home page optimization, design for ROI and usability best practices should be forgotten. For the users who DO land on the home page, and experience subsequent pages of a site, every touch point does matter. Check out these great posts by my colleague Sandra Niehaus on exactly that topic:

Every Touch Point Matters – Optimize the Log Out Thank You Page

Every Touch Point Matters – Optimizing the Email Unsubscribe

And if you’re interested in reading THE BOOK about designing for ROI, check out Lance and Sandra’s book: Web Design for ROI.

What This Means for Websites

I’ve talked with a number of clients who have wanted to “do SEO”, but still think of their sites as brick and mortar entities, which means they expect visitors will all enter their site through the “main” entrance, the Home Page, which is certainly not true.

Thus, these clients are often surprised when we start talking about:

• An overall SEO site strategy
• Optimizing for short- and long-tail keywords
• Engaging in a full-scale page mapping strategy for strategic keywords
• Removing duplicate content
• Enhancing their internal search engines

We talk about these aspects of a comprehensive SEO strategy because any domain can generally only rank once, maybe twice, on the first page of Google search results for a non-branded query.

With this kind of limited real-estate for each domain, web sites need to be aware of the many opportunities offered to them by optimizing deeper level pages so they rank well in search results for related queries – opening the door, if you will, to those multiple entry points, rather that keeping them closed tight.

If the Tesco store I was at on Sunday was an online store, I would have bailed within a few minutes of not being able to locate my sour cream. I would have gone back to the Google search results and either clicked on another result on the first page, or conducted another search entirely.

And I wouldn’t have been alone.

More than 68% of the time, searchers only look at the first page of results (Source: MarketingSherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2009) – which gives your site a roughly 1 in 10 chance of catching their interest before they move on.

Thus, realizing that online shoppers can enter your virtual store from almost any point (as long your site is properly indexed) and that they will abandon your site within a few minutes of not finding what they’re looking for, means that optimizing your site for multiple entry points is more important than ever.

Optimizing for Multiple Points of Entry

Step 1: Realize that searchers have the potential to enter your site via any of your indexed pages, based on their queries.

Step 2: Identify the strategic keywords for your site. This is done through keyword research, identifying keyword trends and emerging terms, checking your keyword referral data from your site analytics package, and understanding what pages of your site have the potential to contribute most to your bottom line. This applies to both short- and long-tail keywords.

Step 3: Map your strategic keywords to those pages identified in Step 2 (roughly 2-3 unbranded keywords per page is ideal) and plan to build new pages that address keyword areas not currently represented. THESE pages are the ones that will become the multiple entry points into your site, and thus, these are the pages that can have the most potential impact on your site’s overall success.

Step 4: Optimize those pages, focusing on the “on-page” content, the code and Meta data, and “off-page” elements such as link building.

Step 5: Build into your site page templates a “path to purchase” or “path to conversion”. There’s no use in having specific pages rank in search results if users can’t do what you want them to do (e.g. buy, download or sign up) once they are there.

Step 6: Revamp your internal search engine. Remember those helpful Tesco employees? Even though they were nice, and gave me specific options (like “salad cream”) or a general section to investigate (e.g. the “milk” aisle) I still couldn’t find what I was looking for. This experience is the mirror image of the numerous experiences I’ve had using a site’s internal “Search” box. And if you’ve got visitors entering your site through multiple entry points, chances are they will conduct a search. Don’t let those potential customers get away by having less-than-adequate internal search results.

Step 7: Measure your results. All the planning and strategy in the world won’t pay off unless you know where your most valuable sources of traffic are coming from, how well they’re converting and what you can do to improve those conversions.

What Next?

Take a good, hard look at the pages on your site and ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have a keyword strategy in place, an overall site strategy?
2. Are your pages well-optimized?
3. Do they include conversion points at each possible entry?
4. What about your internal search engine? (Do a few searches of your own and see what kind of results you get.)

Then talk to your agency or internal SEO team about their overall strategy for optimizing your site for multiple points of entry.

Such an emphasis on optimizing for multiple points of entry is especially important now, during the economic downturn. While other retail channels are slumping miserably, retail e-commerce is holding its own, relatively speaking. It also has the most upside potential, with a lot of shoppers shifting their discretionary income from brick and mortar stores to online channels – which is why 76% of Senior Marketing executives plan to increase their search marketing budgets in 2009 (Source: eMarketer, 2009).

In addition, every month in the US sees a year-over-year increase in the number of searches being conducted on the major engines – February 2009 saw 32% more US searches than in February 2008 (Source: comScore). This means there are more and more chances EVERY MONTH that pages from your site could show up for some of those millions of queries.

Thus, you can understand my sense of urgency. If you don’t have an SEO site strategy in place that includes optimizing for multiple points of entry, I highly recommend you get one. Soon.

And What about the Fajitas?

Rest assured, they were good – and it was the sour cream that made ALL the difference.

View related topics: client-expectations, search-engine-rankings, SEO, seo-success, Web Usability