All your pages should work as page one

⚙️ Hints and Hacks

Mark Baker's studies have changed the way many people view web browsing, myself included. The title of the book responsible for this change couldn't be more precise: Every Page Is Page One. That is, it doesn't matter the location or hierarchical level of a web page - to be relevant, it needs to work on its own, which means we need to build it with the same mindset used for our home pages.

Let's take an example to understand why: an e-commerce store with a ridiculously large amount of content, Amazon. Go to Google and type the following:

website: amazon.com

What you are saying to the Google Search Engine is that you only want to see pages that are part of the domain amazon.com. On the results page, Google reports that there are 138 million pages that meet this condition, that is, that belong to the Amazon website.

Now use Google pagination to reach even more distant results. I went to page 16, where I found the following result:

Amazon.com: Audible New Releases: Books.

That is, if someone only types "Amazon" into Google, they probably won't enter this page since it will be a couple of light-years far from the first page of results.

But this is not the standard user behavior. If you only type "Amazon", you probably want to know something global about the company, or you want to go to Amazon's homepage. The most common scenarios are those where the user wants precise information, and to find this information, they refine their search with more keywords.

If, for example, I was interested in discovering the latest audiobook releases from Amazon, I might type something like "Amazon audible new releases." In this case, the same page of the previous example would be the first organic result brought by Google.

Now, keeping this behavior in mind, let's consider an indisputable fact about the use of the web today: for the vast majority of sites, organic user traffic comes mainly from Google. This means that no matter how much you structure your site in a way that leads the user's browsing starting from the homepage, passing through the second layer and then reaching the third—according to the traditional web browsing model—, the journey of most users will not follow this funnel.

Instead, they will type specific terms into Google, which will take them directly to internal pages. With that, in the real world, any page on your site can and will serve as a landing page. If the moment they land on that internal page, users don't find properly contextualized content, they will leave and try something different in Google.

That's why Amazon needs to see all of its 138 million pages as potential landing pages. If I type "Amazon audible new releases" on Google and I'm taken directly to the internal page that presents the releases, this page needs to work on its own. In other words, it needs to answer the "question" I asked Google, without any information gaps dependent on different layers of the site. Likewise, its category, brand, and product pages must work as landing pages: when entering directly, the user needs to have enough context to start the journey towards conversion from there.