We’ve seen it time and time again. You go to a website and everything is there, including the kitchen sink.
You’ve got outgoing links to recommended resources, you’ve got their recommended books on Amazon, you’ve got a compilation of articles, you’ve got a large product showcase, and seemingly everything else under the sun.
Speaking great John Childers once said “A confused mind never buys.” But a confused mind is exactly what you’re creating when you offer too many options on a website.
Now it’s okay to have a “corporate” or “catalog” site. But, if you’re trying to sell a bunch of different products from this one site, and it’s your only site, then you’re probably overwhelming your visitor with too many options. They become confused and they leave, never to be seen again.
A general rule of thumb is one product, one website. This allows you to keyword optimize the page to draw traffic based on what you’re selling on that particular page. If you have everything you offer on just one site it makes it very difficult to optimize that site for the search engines.
If you’re using advertising and pay-per-click search engine you should be driving traffic to a specific site that will do the sales job for you. If you send them to a corporate site you should at least send them directly to a sub-page on the site that features the product you want to sell.
Don’t leave it to your visitor to search through your corporate or catalog site to find what you were advertising. Most won’t do it unless they’re really, really motivated.
Keep things simple for your visitors. One product—one site.
