Do You Have Multiple Front Doors?

Trumpet players don't care about product information on drums. People are interested in the things that meet their needs and nothing else.

That's why you will be more effective if you can get people to information more quickly. We've already talked about one way to do that in the area where we talked about making searches easier. This is something else. Here I want you to think about having separate entry points for a couple of specific classes of folks.

If your users break into distinct groups, then have a separate entry point for each group. The way you might do things if you were a musical instrument store is a good example. You can divide by classes of instrument, like guitars, brasswinds, and woodwinds. You can divide by type of buyer like school band directors, students, rock band musicians and more. Your business won't use these categories, but you'll certainly have several different groups you'll be able to identify.

You can go further with this if you like, by giving a separate entry point to every specific question or problem that you identify in your research. We find that most specific groups have somewhere between five and twelve of these.

Here's a tip on how to make it work. Create a separate entry point or front door for each group. Put that entry point in its own sub-directory. That will enable you to promote the entry point separately to search engines.

There's another way that you can use separate entry points effectively. That's to create special entry points for your best customers. At the technological far end of this, we have personalized pages, but you can certainly set up separate special (password-protected if need be) entry points for your top customers. That's the principle behind Dell's premier pages, and they have thousands of them.

Five points if you have a level of multiple front doors appropriate to your technology.

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