Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Your Brand Needs a Life Beyond Your Home Page

A new article on B to B magazine's web site raises yet another reason to weave and support your company's brand narratives throughout your web site. Author Marie Griffin writes "Given that searchers link to sites based on keywords and content, they often don’t enter by way of a home page."

The continued rise of search makes it likely that visitors will increasingly go straight to interior pages of your site. Meaning that if your brand message lives only (or primarily) on your home page, your online audiences may never hear your story about what makes your company special.

Obviously, it's a fine line between communicating the brand and getting in the way of the user's quest for specific content. And the width of that line varies from one situation to the next. For instance, technical content aimed at engineering audiences certainly shouldn't be obfuscated by verbose brand messaging.

Still, it's worth auditing your company's site to determine A) where the brand story is currently leveraged (and where it isn't); and B) what brand communication tactics—visual, textual and otherwise—could be incorporated to ensure that search-driven visitors don't miss the big picture.

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