I talk a good bit on here about how Google is sending less traffic to most websites, and that more of the traffic they send is from branded searches (people searching specifically for your company). That’s all true, but the combination of those two things is leading to something interesting.
In many cases, while overall traffic from Google is fading, they’re actually sending more traffic to your home page. Getting less of the traditional SEO searches means less traffic to internal pages, but branded searches almost always lead to your home page. This video from Rand Fishkin explains more.
For real?
It sounded good in theory, but I wanted to see for myself. I checked out a handful of our client’s sites to compare the past 365 days against the 365 days before that, and here’s what I found:
- One was down 15% in overall Google traffic, but home page traffic was up 4%.
- Another was down 15% in overall Google traffic, but home page traffic was up 174%!
- Another was down 39% in overall Google traffic, but home page traffic was up 4%.
We certainly had some that were up in both a few down in both, but the trend was very clear — overall traffic from Google is down, but traffic to the home page is up.
Not good
Ultimately this is kind of a bad thing. Traffic coming to your home page isn’t something to avoid, but traffic that comes to a specific sub-page is usually better targeted. Rather than getting an overview of what you do, they’re getting details on a specific service that you offer.
Home pages have always been the most popular pages on any site, but the trend seems to be pushing further in that direction. Are you seeing similar stats with your site?
