Do Your Deep Pages Mean Anything To Visitors Who Start There?

As website owners, we often envision paths through our site (“First they’ll start here, then they’ll click here…”) But, if we do a good job with our search engine optimization, visitors enter in strange places. Every page (with the exception of pages off limits to the search engines) has to be clearly labeled as if someone were entering the site right there.

For example, if you do a Google search on T-Mobile call Canada, you’ll probably get this page high in the SERP:

www.t-mobile.com/templates/faq.aspx?PAsset=Inl_Pop_FAQ

But when you click through, the T-Mobile page is a list of FAQs to a specific, albeit unnamed T-Mobile program. It’s ok to land on the wrong page, it happens, but maybe this was the right page ? And the customer never figured out the answer, and there was no navigation so the customer finally called the 1-800-TMobile number (just what T-Mobile doesn’t want. Conversion on a customer service site is about creating great service on the site, not about frustration ending in a phone call that costs the company money.)

All they needed to do was label the page Frequently Asked Questions: Program Name and be sure to link the Program Name (whatever it was) back to the actual program. (After all, visitors who land there have no back button to see the path T-Mobile had in mind.) Some persistent navigation would be nice, too, so that visitors can go back to the site and find what they really are looking for.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics